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On Monday evening, September 15, 1952, in a course entitled “Psychoanalytic Therapy” at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, Karen Horney began what was to be her last series of lectures. She died less than three months later, on December 4, 1952, having had to interrupt her course after delivering only five of the fifteen planned lectures. In a brief reminiscence that concludes Final Lectures, a volume containing the transcript of these five lectures edited by Douglas H. Ingram, Edward R. Clemmens, a former student of Horney's, gives us a picture of that remarkable woman as she stood in front of his class, speaking in her inimitable way. She was “unconcerned about syntax and purity of diction,” Clemmens says, but was “enormously concerned with what she had to say and how to involve her listeners” (p. 107). “There was about her,” he goes on, “an air of wholeness, of certainty, of total dedication and commitment, of a conviction that her ideas were valuable, that they were worth sharing with colleagues and students because knowing them would make a difference to helping those in need” (p. 107).
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the works of Karen Horney. Fueled in large measure by the recognition that her writings on female psychology anticipated later developments in this field, this interest has also encompassed her views on narcissistic defenses and on the way in which environmental and cultural influences interact with intrapsychic forces. Dismissed for many years by classically trained analysts as a renegade who rejected the basic tenets of Freudian theory and whose contributions lacked depth, she has gained recognition for the originality and independence of her thinking and for her courage in articulating ideas that were well ahead of their time.