The Kinetic Mind

I want to thank the members of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and particularly Dr. Joanne Gerardi for this invitation to be tonight's guest speaker.

It is a particular honor for me as I have been practicing Dr. Horney's theory for at least 35 years. I believe that Dr. Horney's psychodynamic concepts are still the most practical, far-reaching and effective that we have in application to treatment of emotional malfunction.

For many years I have been writing and having “serious” fun with a theoretical book I call The Kinetic Mind. The subtitle is Perceptions, Reflections, Speculations and Questions on the Human Mind. The word speculations is important here, though some of the material I wrote about a long time ago is no longer entirely speculative.

Since we have just begun a new decade I would like to share some new ideas or perhaps new or at least different ways of looking at old ideas with you. In any case, what follows is largely from The Kinetic Mind, a work in progress, which would not progress at all without the input of many theoretical works that preceded, not the least of which was that of Karen Horney. Indeed, at least in part, this book may be considered as an attempted integration of extant psychodynamic systems as well as a search for different and potentially illuminating paradigms.

The kinetic or human mind from this perspective is not synonymous with the brain! It is not the exclusive province of the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), but is rather the total experiential human being or the total self. This means the self's complete life experience and includes all that is perceived, noted, and produced or put out—all of which results in affect production and discharge. Affect production and discharge, about which I will say more later, are simultaneous: Affect is discharged as it is produced, but in our immediate discussion the important thing is that the