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In 1939 Karen Horney published her second book, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (3), in which she broke away from Freudian psychoanalysis to which she had previously been faithful as regards its theory and even more so as regards its practice. This break was not iconoclastic; Horney still accepted such basic concepts as the causality of psychological conduct, and in her 1939 book she asserted that the most important and significant of Freud's discoveries is his doctrine that psychic processes are strictly determined. She likewise accepted the principle of unconscious motivation, this being understood as the existence of factors unknown to the subject himself which are capable of determining his behavior. She also accepted the dynamics of the unconscious in its strictly orthodox form, which states that unconscious and repressed desires can only show themselves in disguised form, as occurs for example in dreams. As regards practice, Horney's posture was once again substantially orthodox. The therapeutic relationship reproduces and reactivates repressed desires, and the curative process leads toward the elimination of resistances and the mature resolution of transference. She used free association as the method for the production of analyzable material.
Thus far the area of agreement. The points of disagreement, though not many, are fundamental and give Karen Horney's work a new dimension in which the hope experienced by the therapist and transmitted to the client modifies both theory and practice. The present article is intended to serve as an introduction to this hope and its therapeutic value.
As regards theory, Karen Horney's ideas are as follows.
Horney did not accept the idea that the development of the personality depends on immutable instinctive forces, this being a concept that impregnates psychoanalysis with an aura of fatalism that supposedly can only be overcome by analysis. On the other hand, she held cultural factors
to be determinants of the personality, a sup