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This volume is intended to serve as a guide for those who are contemplating psychoanalytic therapy for themselves, friends or relatives. It answers in a simple manner such questions as the indications for analysis, the duration and frequency of treatment, the cost, the goal to be attained, the respective rôles of the analyst and analysand in the analytic work, the choice of analyst. In large measure, it covers the same territory as Kubie did in his Practical Aspects of Psychoanalysis. A significant difference lies, however, in the orientation.
Neurosis is presented, in accordance with the viewpoint of Horney, as mainly a disturbance in personal relationships, more specifically, as an imbalance of the three kinds of movement that one individual may manifest toward another. In the neurotic, 'moving toward' in a spirit of affection, trust and interdependency becomes distorted into excessive compliance; 'moving against' in healthy competition passes over into a need for domination; 'moving away', to secure the solitude necessary for full cultivation of one's personality, becomes withdrawal and seclusiveness. Since compliance results in being subjugated, and the wish to dominate evokes the threat of reprisal, and withdrawal leads to the danger of complete isolation, the equilibrium of the neurotic is inevitably unstable. Furthermore, since these trends coexist, the neurotic finds himself pulled in different directions at the same time. Various defenses must therefore be set up, such as repression and denial of certain of the conflicting trends, rationalization of the defect into a virtue, projection of internal difficulties onto the outer world, renunciation of all emotion with resultant detachment. The main work of the analysis is to render manifest the contradictory trends and the defenses set in motion to maintain them; then, by a process of working through and pointing up their unhealthy, indiscriminate and compulsive nature, reason finally dictates their aban