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The invitation to present the Karen Horney Lecture has special meaning for me personally. I began my own psychoanalytic training in the early 1940s, just at the time when Karen Horney had taken the leadership in breaking with the orthodox New York psychoanalytic establishment because of her dissatisfaction with their narrow, rigid, and inflexible views, which allowed of no deviation from the orthodox psychoanalytic gospel of the time. Her insistence that psychoanalysis could not flourish without receptivity to new research findings and ideas met with a stone wall of hostile ad hominem comments on her “penis envy.” Together with a group of other analysts of stature who shared her views-Clara Thompson, Harold and Sarah Kilman, Judd Marmor, Bernard Robbins, William Silverberg, and Alexander Martin, among others-Horney established a new training institute in which new formulations could be examined and evaluated. I had the great good fortune to be a student in several of her classes and to share a number of individual case supervision sessions with her. For this audience, it is not necessary for me to dwell on the enormous value I gained from these training experiences with Dr. Horney.
As important as the actual content of what I was learning, if not more so, was the experience of being a part of a professional group in which the faculty were exploring new directions in both theory and practice and shared their ideas with the students, who were encouraged to question and to criticize. This was a model for stimulating a productive approach to scientific work which I have never forgotten.
It is most appropriate that now, 40 years later, the Psychoanalytic