You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In one sense, the circumstances that led to the founding of the AAP in 1941 can be said to have had their origins in the decades earlier in the factors that shaped Karen Horney's personality and gave her the capacity to be an independent and creative thinker. In a more immediate sense, however, they can be traced to the appearance in 1937 of her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. The impact of that book on those of us who were then students at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute was extraordinary! There we were, struggling arduously to master classical psychoanalytic theory and practice, wrestling with issues of psychic energy, cathexis, and countercathexis, levels of libidinal development, Eros and Thanatos, structural theory, and so on, when along came this book that spoke of feelings, conflicts, and defenses in terms we could immediately identify, within ourselves as well as in our clinical work with our patients—a book free of obfuscating jargon and mumbo jumbo.
Those of us who were not already deeply committed by virtue of transference or doctrinaire loyalty to classical theory began to seek out this refreshing “voice” in the Institute for seminars and supervision, and Horney's influence among the students began to grow rapidly. This fact, together with the fact that her book became a best-seller among lay readers, was a source of considerable irritation to the more conservative members of the Psychoanalytic Institute. However, in 1939 when Horney's second book, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, appeared, in which she directly confronted and challenged many of the basic tenets of classical analytic theory, their irritation turned to anger and alarm.
At the same time, dissatisfaction was increasing among the students and the liberal faculty members about the continued rigidity of the Institute's educational program. In June 1939, the students organized and petitioned the Institute hierarchy to liberalize the training program. The requests that we made a