In These Pages…

The first volume of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis appeared in 1941, sixty years ago. It was the inaugural issue of the journal of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, which was formed in May of 1941, three weeks after Harmon Ephron, Karen Horney, Sarah Kelman, Bernard Robbins, and Clara Thompson sent an official letter of resignation to the secretary of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. These senior analysts expressed their unhappiness that “reverence for dogma replaced free inquiry” at the Society, and stated that they were “interested only in the scientific advancement of psychoanalysis in keeping with the courageous spirit of its founder, Sigmund Freud” (Rubins, 1978, p. 240). Karen Horney, a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and the author of close to fifty articles and two books by 1941, and her colleagues did not waste any time after their separation from the New York Psychoanalytic Society in pursuing these lofty goals. The first volume of the Journal listed twenty-one charter members of the Association, as well as the tentative prospectus of required and elective courses offered by the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. The institute, the training arm of the Association, was established in June 1941, with Karen Horney as dean. There were thirteen courses and seminars offered to students in training, totaling 180 hours (Quinn, 1987).

The rest, as they say, is history, and it is elaborated by Douglas Ingram in a three-part lecture series he gave in Germany. In the first Hofgeismar lecture, he gives a grand account of Horney's most important ideas and the evolution of her theories. In the second, he describes a rich clinical case of a man who returned to analysis after the death of his mother; Ingram sheds light on this loss, how the person's intrapsychic strivings were connected to the external world from the Horneyan point of view. The patient, caught in a conflict of satisfying his mother and deeply resen