Letters to the Editor

I was delighted that Joyce Lerner's thoughtful paper on “Horney Theory

and Mother/Child Impact on Early Childhood” (1) and mine “On Early Alienation from the Self” (2) have caused their first ripples in Douglas H. Ingram's letter. In answering it, I hope that many additional ripples with many different perimeters will follow this first one. As to Douglas Ingram's broader conceptualization of “basic anxiety,” I tend to concur that “a reaction of accommodation to elements destructive to the child's real self” may be observed since the infant's earliest days. However, if we stick to the literal construction of basic anxiety, as given by Horney, I agree with Joyce Lerner in placing the distinct appearance of “feeling helpless and alone in a potentially hostile world” into the time of the rapprochement subphase of child development.

I came to this conclusion by a quite different route from that of Joyce Lerner. Considering the many differing views of the genesis of character pathology, it occurred to me that they need not be mutually exclusive, as it might seem at first blush, but that they can be easily strung together in a temporary and logical sequence, basic anxiety being about in the middle of the following list of preconditions needed for the development of functional pathology:

1. Phallic subphase: failure in realistic mastery (Rado; 4, p. 137); fixation in the phallic stage (W. Reich; 4, p. 147)

2. Rapprochement subphase: basic anxiety (Horney, 5); overwhelming anxiety does not stem disintegration of protective armor (Sullivan; 4, p. 146); inferiority complex (A. Adler; 4, p. 124); a flight to the externalized object (M. Klein; 4, p. 146), bringing about excessive dependency; conflict of the archetypes and complexes with the intents of the conscious personality (C. G. Jung; 4, p. 143)

3. Object constancy subphase: unresolved Oedipus complex (Freud; 4, pp. 113-116); socialization defect (Fromm; 4, p. 135)

Of course, this list could also include additional basic p