Letters to the Editor

Joyce Lernen's commendable paper, “Horney Theory and Mother/Child Impact on Early Childhood” (1), earned the Alexander Reid Martin Award of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. As a member of the Awards Committee selecting Ms. Lerner's paper, and applauding its selection on the basis of general merit, I have two reservations about its content.

First, Lerner argues that basic anxiety, Karen Horney's concept referring to the experience of being helpless and alone in a potentially hostile world, is an experience only possible when the child has achieved sufficient psychic organization, namely, the rapprochement subphase of the separation-individuation process. This concept of Margaret Mahler refers to the child's new awareness that he is small and weak, and not a participant in his mother's seeming omnipotence. Fred Pine, one of Mahler's collaborators, writes of rapprochement in words reminiscent of Horney's basic anxiety: “no longer can the illusion of unity [with the mother] be maintained, and the child experiences himself as alone in a big world” (2, p. 233).

This strikes me as a limiting and excessively literal construction of basic anxiety, a concept so fundamental to Horney's view of the genesis of character pathology. In my own thinking, I use basic anxiety to refer to the child's experience of a world in which elements destructive of the child's real self impel an accommodation, leading to an alienated self and to the organization of certain trends that become rigid and indiscriminate, and that require maladaptive defenses, all perpetuating the neurotic process. Furthermore, basic anxiety, by this broader interpretation, may recur: its manifestations and consequences correlate with the child's maturational stages. Basic anxiety, then, may occur before differentiation from the mother or even in the early days of attachment to her. Like Winnicott's “false-self,” alienation from the real self can arise well before the period of rapproc