Psychoanalytic Identity

The identity of a psychoanalytic group is based essentially on its unique history, the particular makeup of its membership, and its guiding spirit and ideas. I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize what I see as some of the essential ideas and spirit of the Horney psychoanalytic group, transmitted both through oral tradition and the written word, which contribute to its particular identity. I will also discuss what I believe are some of the challenges to that identity as well as to psychoanalysis as a whole. For recent, more general overviews of Horney's contributions the reader is referred to Ingram (1985), Symonds and Symonds (1985), and “Karen Horney's Contribution: Retrospective and Prospective Views,” A Round Table (in preparation).

Writing in the New York Times, Rabbi Susan Schnur (1985) takes Freud to task for speaking of love and work as the only two areas of human fulfillment. Rabbi Schnur feels that love and work must be informed by moral concern, “… work, love and moral acts. It's upon the latter that the first two hinge, upon the latter that life … becomes entirely worth the effort.” This, to me expresses one of the crucial characteristics of our school of thought. This is not a claim of moral superiority. It is a claim that Dr. Horney and her followers have opened the door to a systematic understanding of moral values as part of the psychoanalytic domain.

We've done this in two main ways. First, Horney showed convincingly how a person's values grow out of his or her particular character structure. She showed that to the extent that neurotic or compulsive forces are at work in one's character structure, one's values will be based on these compulsive strivings. So an understanding of our patients’ values and morality becomes very much a part of our work.

Second, and more significantly, this interest in values has taken us beyond a false image of scientific objectivity, an image which is now