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It is well known that during the early years of psychoanalysis general resistance to this new science assumed the crudest forms. Of the manner in which it is still expressed, Freud recently wrote1:
The battle is still going on, but in a more respectable way. There is another new factor, and that is that in the scientific world a kind of buffer state has been formed between analysis and its opponents, consisting of people who will allow that there is something in analysis (and even believe in it, subject to the most diverting reservations) but who, on the other hand, reject other parts of it, as they are eager let everyone know. What determines their choice is not easy to guess. It seems to be a matter of personal sympathies… The circumstance that the structure of psychoanalysis, although unfinished, nevertheless already possesses a unified organization from which one cannot select elements according to one's whim seems not to enter the minds of these eclectics. When I consider these half or quarter followers, I never get the impression from any of them that their rejections are based on an examination of the material.
A book has been published which promises to reveal new ways in psychoanalysis. Several things are to be removed from the structure of psychoanalysis (one does not learn what determines Dr. Horney's choice) and then everything will be all right again. Her attitude is: the theoretical superstructure, which is false, is to be stripped off; the correct observations made by Freud are, however, to be retained, and simply interpreted differently. Truth to tell, much of that which she calls 'theory' and wants to 'strip off' is nothing other than observation. Psychoanalytic theory like every scientific theory is the best and briefest organization and classification of observations which can no more be stripped off arbitrarily than can physics be shorn of its theories and remain physics.
What, precisely, gives offense to Dr. Horney and must be changed so