Second Special Issue: Changing Theoretical and Clinical Issues

We end 2025 with this second Special Issue celebrating the 85th anniversary of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, with invited submissions that examine the impact of societal, cultural, environmental and scientific changes and forces on individuals, psychoanalytic practice and theory. Each paper explores the process of revisiting our theories to best address the clinical challenges we face daily in our rapidly changing world.

From early on in her career, our founder, Karen Horney, MD, considered the profound impact of cultural and societal factors on personality and intrapsychic life (Horney, 1937, 1945, 1950). She lived during a time of upheaval and experienced many professional, political and cultural changes, including her own migration from Germany to the United States. Horney (1923–1936, 1939) questioned concepts in psychoanalysis that did not fit with her experience and what she saw in her consulting room developing a constructive theory of character development rooted in her belief that “[w]e would not be able to mobilize life-affirming forces if they were not there in the patient from the beginning; only under the stress of anxiety and damned-up libidinal drives have they turned into destructive impulses, sadism, and cruelty” (Horney, 1931, pp. 135–136).

We begin in the area of feminine psychology, where Horney made significant contributions (see Horney, 1923–1936, 1927–1952). In “Re-Finding the Feminine: Forgotten Threads of Meaning in Psychoanalysis,” Marilyn Charles (2025) examines how Freud's challenge in understanding women, relegating them to the “dark continent” (Freud, 1926, p. 212) marginalized women and the feminine in psychoanalytic theory, positioning them as objects and not the subjects. Using two seminal feminine psychology papers by Horney (1923–1936) along with the voices of other prominent women in psychoanalysis (Riviere, Kristeva, Aulagnier,