Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Karen Horney: A Gateway to Her Life, Ideas, and Legacy

Karen Horney: A Gateway to Her Life, Ideas, and Legacy

Graham, Josh

Paperback

Series: Pioneers of Human Behaviour

Biographies GeneralGeneral Psychology

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798177987095
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 82
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.21 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Be perfectly honest, generous and brave. Never be tired. Do in one hour what can only be done in two or three. Karen Horney called the inner voice that gives orders like these the tyranny of the should, and she traced it back to a frightened child's attempt to become someone else in order to feel safe.

Her portraits are easy to recognise: the person who agrees too quickly and cannot bear to be disliked, the one who has to win every argument, the one who keeps everyone at a distance and calls it independence. She saw them as three ways an anxious child learns to deal with others, by moving toward people, against them or away from them, and none of the three is a flaw until it hardens into a compulsion. Albert Ellis counted her idea of the shoulds among the early influences on his therapy, and Aaron Beck borrowed her phrase, with her name beside it, in the book that set out cognitive therapy.

Her challenge to Freud cost her. On 29 April 1941 the New York Psychoanalytic Society voted, twenty-four to seven, to demote her, after more than a year of pressure from colleagues who thought that what she taught was no longer psychoanalysis. She walked out, four colleagues followed her, and within three weeks they had formed an association of their own. She had come a long way to that room. The daughter of a preaching sea captain, she decided at thirteen to become a doctor, when no German university yet admitted women as regular students, qualified in Berlin, and in the 1920s took on Freud's account of women from inside his own movement.

This book gives the other side too. It sets her ideas beside the critics who answered them, from orthodox Freudians to the Marxist Herbert Marcuse and the feminist Juliet Mitchell, and beside the evidence: her three trends have been measured, and the rest of her theory has been tested far less, if at all. It follows the dissenter of 1941 to 1943, when her own institute withdrew Erich Fromm's right to train analysts, on the ground that he was not a physician. And it reports the testimony about her conduct with younger colleagues as testimony: unresolved in its details, serious in what it describes.

I believe that man can change and go on changing as long as he lives, she wrote in 1945. Her ideas help most at the point of noticing: which of your standards you chose, and which were chosen for you.

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