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Founded in 1991, the International Karen Horney Society (IKHS) currently has over 250 members in 23 countries. We held our first conference in New York in April 1993 and our second conference in Rome in May 1994. Papers from the Rome conference appear in the current issue of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
On June 26-29, 1995, the IKHS conducted a seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia. The topic was “Karen Horney's Theory and Its Applications in Science and Clinical Practice,” and the seminar was cosponsored by the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Russian Psychoanalytic Association. We are grateful to Mikhail Reshetnikov, M.D., Director of the East European Institute, and Sergei Tcherkasov, Ph.D., Dean of Faculty, who hosted the seminar, and to Yelena Zamfir, who served as interpreter. Yelena Zamfir has translated Feminine Psychology into Russian and is currently translating Neurosis and Human Growth.
The St. Petersburg seminar was conducted by three members of the IKHS. On June 26, Bernard Paris, Ph.D., spoke on “Karen Horney vs. Sigmund Freud: A Structural Theory of Neurosis.” He argued that the most significant aspect of Horney's quarrel with Freud was her shift in emphasis, both in theory and clinical practice, from the past to the present. She replaced Freud's focus on genesis with a structural approach, arguing that psychoanalysis should be less concerned with infantile origins than with the current constellation of defenses and inner conflicts. This feature of her theory sharply differentiated it from classical psychoanalysis and created a resistance to her approach in those who were trained to explain the present by attempting to recover the past.
On June 27, Mario Rendon, M.D., spoke on the use of Karen Horney's theory in clinical practice. He presented the case of a woman in treatment with him, giving her history, describing what had occurred in analysis thus far, and suggesting a Horneyan interpretation of her character structure and beh