Horney and the Interpretation of Character Chair: Bernard J. Paris, Ph.D.

This workshop began with a discussion of Horney's as a theory of character neurosis and then explored the ways in which her theory can be used to analyze Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.

In New Ways in Psychoanalysis, Horney contrasts her structural orientation with Freud's genetic approach. She has a different conception of the relation between childhood experience and adult neuroses, she traces behavior to character structure rather than to infantile origins, and she employs a synchronic rather than a diachronic mode of explanation. Whereas Freud's mechanistic-evolutionistic thinking holds that “nothing really new is created in the process of development,” that “what we see today is only the old in a changed form,” Horney's evolutionistic thinking presupposes “that things which exist today have not existed in the same form from the very beginning, but have developed out of previous stages. These preceding stages may have little resemblance to the present forms, but the present forms would be unthinkable without the preceding ones” (p. 42).

Horney's model is one in which early experiences profoundly affect us not by producing fixations that cause us to repeat earlier patterns but by conditioning the ways in which we respond to the world, which in turn are influenced by subsequent experiences and eventually evolve into our adult character structure. The adult character structure can be understood synchronically, in terms of the present constellation of defenses and conflicts, even when we know little or nothing about its development. Because of