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The purpose of this presentation is to examine the way in which Karen Horney's psychoanalytic ideas transcend the current polarizing controversy in psychoanalysis: that between classical psychoanalysis and the self-psychology movement most commonly associated with the work of Heinz Kohut. To accomplish this purpose it will first be necessary to review a few of the major aspects of this controversy. Then some of the major aspects of Horney's work will be reviewed with special emphasis on those ideas which are pertinent to the aforementioned controversy. And finally, brief attention will be paid to Horney's place in the history of the psychoanalytic movement.
In the past fifteen years we have witnessed a growing debate in American psychoanalysis sparked by the work of Heinz Kohut (1, 2). Briefly put, the Kohutian self-psychology movement stresses the central importance of the self in understanding not only certain disorders of personality but the human condition as a whole. Followers of this trend have called this the third revolution in psychoanalysis, the first two being the introduction of drive psychology and ego psychology, respectively. Classicists argue that Kohut's work, while providing some additional insights, really doesn't represent a new psychoanalytic paradigm. For the classicist the original theoretical constructs of Sigmund Freud are still considered adequate enough to understand the human condition, both healthy and pathological. While the self-psychologists put the central emphasis on self formation, deformation or deficit, and the sequelae of such deficit, the classicists emphasize persistent adherence to a model of intersystemic psychic conflict between the mental agencies as described in Freud's structural model. Thus one often hears this referred to as the deficit vs. conflict paradigm controversy.