Introductory Remarks

A year ago, in these same lecture halls of the International University Menendez y Pelayo, we paid tribute to the memory of Erich Fromm. We stated at the time, that this university is a most appropriate place for the commemoration and dissemination of his work. Fromm's work has a constructive orientation. He denounced the impoverishment of the emotional life from which occidental people suffer. We reiterated how, in Fromm's opinion, the psychoanalytic method must promote the sort of critical knowledge that represents an act of freedom, in which it attacks the alienated reality of the human being and makes a person aware of the capacities that he or she suppressed in his or her process of adaptation.

This year our subject is Karen Horney, another great pioneer who approached psychoanalysis with an open and free attitude. Perhaps for this reason she has been neglected in our professional world, particularly in Europe. As we stated to be the case with Fromm, Horney's work has also been read mainly by intellectuals rather than by psychoanalysts. The latter have maintained the classical attitudes of devaluation and aversion toward anything that might question the established order.

In 1910, only two years after psychoanalysis was introduced in Berlin, and while Karen Horney was still a medical student, she began her analysis with Karl Abraham. She was part of the first group to receive psychoanalytic training from Freud's immediate disciples. With the consistency that characterized her entire life and work, and motivated by her thirst for knowledge, Horney outlined at 18 years of age what would become her personal as well as her professional goals. She had written in her diary that her task was to learn to know the slender vibrations of her soul and to become incorruptly sincere with herself and clear to others, thus finding the proper measure of her own internal world. Perhaps there is no simpler and more precise way of summarizing what was going to be her own work, namel