New Ways in Psychoanalysis

Horney's second book takes up Freud's theory point by point, to separate what she held to be its lasting findings from the premises she thought had hampered it. She keeps what she calls Freud's fundamental findings: that psychic processes are strictly determined, that actions and feelings may have unconscious motives and that resistance guards them, the role of emotional forces and conflict, repression and the other defences, the meaning of dreams, the formative power of early experience, transference and free association. She rejects his instinct theory and the mechanistic and evolutionistic thinking beneath it, together with his neglect of culture. Her thesis is that psychoanalysis should outgrow the limits set by its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology. She says that she is not founding a new school. Successive chapters re-examine the libido theory, which she judges unsubstantiated, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, feminine psychology and the death instinct. They also treat the emphasis on childhood, transference, culture and neurosis, the ego and the id, anxiety, the super-ego, neurotic guilt feelings and masochistic phenomena. In place of instinctual drives she puts neurotic trends. These are strivings for safety and satisfaction, such as the need for affection or for perfection, by which a person who feels helpless in a hostile world copes with it in some measure of safety. Anxiety arises when such a safety device is endangered. The last chapter, on therapy, sets as its aim restoring the patient to themself, so that the safety devices are no longer needed and spontaneity returns. Horney acknowledges debts to Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Harald Schultz-Hencke and Max Horkheimer. She credits Fromm with showing how central the loss of self is to neurosis.