The Work of Karen Horney

This opportunity to address an assemblage of distinguished colleagues in a language that I acquired as a young man is a moving experience. Psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in particular, have been the major focus of interest in much of my life. I was inspired in this by two people, both well known. The first was Silvano Arieti, a close friend and classmate of mine at the University of Pisa and a colleague during many years in New York. He was one of the most outstanding psychiatrists in the United States and the author of numerous publications. His untimely death last year has been a severe loss to our profession. Karen Horney was the other source of inspiration for me. It was the reading of her books that prompted me to apply for training at her institute. I had the good fortune of participating in courses that she taught and to have attended many meetings at which she spoke. In this paper, I will give some of Karen Horney's biography as it relates to her work, and then I will go on to consider the connection between her theories and her personality.

We can divide Horney's work, in a somewhat arbitrary way, into five phases. In the first one she was a young physician in Berlin before and during World War I, at which time she wrote papers very much in orthodox Freudian style. However, even then some of her ideas were distinct. In 1917 she wrote, and these are her words, “Psychoanalysis can free a human being who has been tied hand and foot. It cannot give him new arms and legs. Psychoanalysis, however, has shown us that much that we have regarded as constitutional, merely represents a blockage of growth which can be lifted” (1). These words have a prophetic ring. Twenty-five years later they became the centerpiece of her theory.

During the second phase, after 1920, Horney had become an important member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, which, as I am sure you