Discussion of “The Goals of Analytic Therapy”

Karen Horney's paper entitled “The Coals of Analytic Therapy” begins with the sentence, “The goals of psychoanalysis have changed in recent years.” During the 50 years since the publication of her paper the goals have changed monumentally and the nature of psychoanalysis in both theory and practice is quite different than one would have ever imagined for those who were trained around the time that Karen Horney was writing this very interesting and significant contribution to the analytic literature. Karen Horney, among others, changed the way in which we think about the psychosexual development of women and in particular the role of the Oedipus complex, castration, and penis envy as the absolute pillars of female development enunciated by Freud. This was among the very beginning elements in the massive changes in theory that have been enunciated prior to and ever since her paper was published. The changes I believe were brought about in an attempt to deal with a number of important problems, some of which have yet to be resolved.

A growing pressure to find other, shorter, more directive, and more specific treatments for serious neurosis and character disorders has been a motivator in the field for almost 40 years. Ten years after Horney's paper, Joseph Wolpe introduced behavior therapy in the United States and essentially threw down the gauntlet in challenging analysis to demonstrate efficacy of the treatment by counting the number of people who were improved versus those who either quit or stayed the same.

In virtually every behavior therapy paper published during the 1960s, there was an important swipe taken at analysis and either an overt or covert challenge made to analytic concepts by the various authors. During the same decade, family therapy, group therapy, and all of the nonanalytic forms of self-enlightenment and growth therapies blossomed.

Reaction to the presumed failures, public relations disappointments, and