New Ways In Psychoanalysis - Karen Horney Deconstructs Freud With Love

Horney Deconstructs Freud 1938

I have never before read Horney although I have had her books, glanced through some, sold some and lost or given away some. So now very late in the game I am reading her.

She carefully and lovingly deconstructs Freud's theories. The libido as instinctual, as biological and genetic. She observes that Freud's thinking is mechanistic based on evolutionary development. Her presentation is simple, very readable and answers so much theoretical formal bullshit that I suggest it be read carefully from that POV.

She tackles the ego, the super ego, anxiety, Oedipus Complex, Libido, Death Instinct, transference, and more in short chapters so readable I wonder how I could have missed her all these years. 

Horney's emphasis moves to the environment of the child and the culture the patient is growing up in. She obviously has studied Marx but gives no indication that she is an advocate of Communism. It is rare that early analysts touched on Marxian theory at all although later Marx would be interwoven with Freud as well as fascism would be.

And she opens not the window but a wide door to consider behaviorism and the result will be Wolpe's Behavior Therapy which seems to be the treatment of choice for almost everything these days and when it stumbles

Bring on the Meds!

My thinking is embedded in my thinking of Dora. For decades I have been on Dora's side of dumping Freud. Her father pimps her to Herr K the husband of his mistress, an older man for his 19 year old daughter who rebuffs him with a slap for seducing him with the same phrase as he seduced her maid, the sub text being that the two women are replaceable commodities; that there is an equal sign between them. Neither is unique.

Recently in rereading Philip Rieff's edition he acknowledges this aspect but goes deeper defending Freud. That Freud is probing deeper under Dora's symptoms to more instinctual incestuous wishes for her own father rather than the cultural environmental psychological sociological one I have been holding for many years along with many other feminists. Freud is after deeper fish.

And as you read Horney who omits this reading gives credence to the modern feminist reading of Dora among other case studies, as well as her work with her own patients. Over the chapters it becomes clear that Horney is interested in aiding her patients to become self sufficient from their symptoms and illnesses, to be functional in this obviously competitive capitalistic antagonistic culture they and she and all of us are in. She wants them to become "well" to be adjusted and contributing to their world in the best way they can. And there you have it.

While it is now obvious that Freud is not after this result. He is after the mind and "soul" of his patients. He is after their linguistic language knowing and thought in their minds so that they will be free thinking humans as he feels himself to be. Whether this means they will be contributing members of their culture or not is a decision each one will have to decide.

Horney studied psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin in the 1920's. this is only 25 years after Freud has published his groundbreaking Studies in Hysteria and Interpretation of Dreams. It is obvious by its absence that Horney was not analyzed by Freud, that she emphasizes the Ego development which characterized almost all of psychoanalytic treatment in the United States. What it did was put a premium on ADJUSTMENT to our culture to achieve within it, to contribute to capitalistic development.

 When she discusses treatment and some case examples we can see that she does not have the skills to work with resistance, narcissism and resistance was discussed in one of Freud's papers. It will take Spotnitz to put his thumb and hand on that aspect and demonstrate it publicly and it will be taught thoroughly by his students. It is invaluable. This is the center of Modern Psychoanalysis as taught in New York City and now elsewhere by former students. Rieff - Sontag's ex-husband - is suggesting this as what Freud might have done with Dora. But it is the Wolfman

who suffered the most if anyone has read his case and his life outcome, this privileged Russian Prince in his palace become a low income refugee subsisting on the dole of miserly psychoanalysts until he dies rather recently in the 1980's I think or not long before that. The last living patient of Freud so ill treated by his disciples but "pensioned" just enough to be sure he would never sell his story to a journalist and then lose it and be destitute forevermore. In her talks with him Oberholzer listens to him bemoan the fact that if it only hadn't happened that he contracted gonorrhea......And Oberholzer says to him, "Oh, the clap! I've had that!" And he is amazed at her insouciance concerning this dread disease he felt ruined his life. He tells her that if only he had had children and grandchildren he would have learned so much. 

Wolf-Man's Painting

Whenever I get to this point in his story I see how much he and all of us missed by being deprived of his art while he was alive. This one is now in a museum. 

Too little too late FUCKERS and I mean the primary disciples of Freud who hid him. 

Couldn't resist that. Freud seems to take the blame for so much that it is a pleasure that Lacan has come to rescue him. to place treatment on "the word" on language, on the unconscious and bypassing the cultural, the environment, the psychological development, the mechanistic technological thinking, jumping right into Joyce, Finnegan's Wake and the future before us, with electric technological thinking. 

Let's see, why did I feel I had to write this in the first place? Now I remember I wanted to bring in the Schachter-Singer Theory of double emotions. Anxiety and Excitement elicit the identical EEG physiological measurements. So whether you feel anxiety or excitement depends on your LABELING of your feelings as anxiety or as excitement. You feel excitement going to an outing where you will meet your new boyfriend and you are so excited. Whereas the same woman going to an outing fearing she will not know anyone and not be dressed appropriately feels anxiety. The same EEG though for your feelings. Reporting the anxiety to the doctor may result in a prescription for Valium or worse. For excitement you wont ask or even go to the doctor. So much for our modern, so very technological treatment options in our time of marvelous sophisticated treatments  IMO.