The Horney Centennial

In honor of the centennial year of Karen Horney's birth, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis convened a roundtable discussion at its midwinter meeting in New Orleans, December, 1985. The discussion was chaired by Jeffrey Rubin, M.D. Participants included Drs. Morton B. Cantor, Louis and Helen De Rosis, Jack Danielian, Marianne Horney Eckardt, Douglas H. Ingram, Norman J. Levy, Ann-Marie Paley, Theodore Isaac Rubin, and Alexandra Symonds. The editors are pleased to include the formal comments of Drs. Jeffrey Rubin, Cantor, Danielian, and Levy. The presentation of Dr. Ingram was previously published as an editorial in a prior issue of the Journal (, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 305-309).

I want to thank Dr. Leo Berman, chairperson of the Historical Committee, as well as the Program Committee of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis for this opportunity to mark the hundredth anniversary of Karen Horney's birth. It is most fitting that this anniversary be recognized by the Academy in some way since it was Dr. Horney who blazed the trail towards the founding of the Academy when she and a half dozen others broke off from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute almost fifty years ago.

On this occasion I've asked our distinguished panelists to emphasize the place of Horney's ideas in the psychoanalytic movement rather than her personal influence-as important as this was. I did this for somewhat selfish reasons. As the newly appointed dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, I thought it was time for a discussion of the many trends in Horney's thinking in terms of past, present, and future directions.

Horney, in her theory and in her clinical work, gave us some revolutionary models or ways of conceptualizing about the individual in his relations to himself, his culture, and his immediate interpersonal environment, as well as his relationship to his own history, his own development, and his future. Such concepts as self-realization, basic conflict, central inner conflict, the