Women Beyond Freud: New Concepts Of Feminine Psychology

Milton M. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134857579
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1994. This volume contains the proceedings of a historic meeting, attended by over 2,000 mental health professionals and lay people, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Centre in New York City. Each contributor to this book offers unique insight into the seminal work of Karen Horney, one of the first psychoanalysts to question Freud's male-centred theories and clinical practices.; The book includes accounts of the formative girlhood experiences that awakened Horney's spirit of independence and the intellectual and cultural currents of her time that influenced her work. A contribution by a Preeminent Sex Therapist Challenges The Notion That Liberated Women threaten the potency of men. Other contributors define the characteristics of relationships that foster or hinder women's psychological growth and discuss the conflicts faced by adolescent girls as they become aware of gender differences.

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Awakened to Life

Sources of Independence in the Girlhood of Karen Horney

SUSAN QUINN

There are three women who were very important in the writing of my biography of Karen Horney. Jean Baker Miller was the first person to mention Karen Horney’s name to me, and it was her praise of Horney that led me some years later to find out more. Marianne Horney Eckardt, Karen Horney’s daughter, was an important source in my research, as were her two sisters, Renate and Brigitte. She and Renate were also the moving forces behind the translation and publication of Karen Horney’s girlhood diaries—a charming book called The Adolescent Diaries of Karen Horney, published in 1980. I considered the diaries to be the true mother lode of my book.

The third person who was important to me in writing the biography was Carol Gilligan, who read the book in manuscript. It was she who pointed out that I was in danger of being overly influenced by the received wisdom about Karen Horney’s work. A standard way of dismissing Horney, in the “orthodox” psychoanalytic world, has always been to say that she was a wonderful clinician, very, very good with patients, but that she had no theory, she was not a thinker. To many of you, this may have a familiar ring: women are often dismissed in this fashion.

As I thought about this book honoring Karen Horney, it seemed important to acknowledge, right at the outset, the originality and the importance of the ideas of Karen Horney. And that has dictated the organization of this paper: I’ll begin with Karen Horney’s work, and then I’ll move on to discuss her girlhood, and to search for clues, in those remarkable and revealing adolescent diaries, to the originality and independence of the woman she became.

I’ll begin by saying that Karen Horney was, contrary to the received wisdom, an important thinker, an articulate writer, and a courageous teacher of her ideas. And because she was outspoken, because she broke with the reigning Freudians in 1941 and founded her own Institute, she has had her ideas appropriated over and over again without attribution. Historians of psychoanalysis have had to admit, however, that Karen Horney was very often there first. The psychologist David Rapaport points out that Karen Horney, in a 1936 paper called “The Problem of the Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” anticipated Anna Freud’s influential book, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1966). “Horney really was the one who, possibly somewhat earlier than Anna Freud, pushed the investigation of defense mechanisms to the fore,” he wrote, “justifiably so, because the psychoanalytic method . . . obliges the analyst to investigate both the unconscious material the patient prevents himself from communicating and the defense mechanisms by which he chooses to prevent . . . such communication” (Rapaport in Gill, 1967, p. 206).

Horney was also the first to write, vividly and at length, about narcissism. She referred to narcissism in different ways—”the pride system” was one term she used—but she was clearly talking about the constellation of behaviors now grouped under the rubric “narcissism. “ She wrote about it first in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and subsequently in Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950). In addition, she suggested—as Heinz Kohut and Christopher Lasch did decades later—that it is the malady of modern times. The narcissistic character described by Heinz Kohut, who goes through life seeking a sense of self through the affirmation of other people, is a very very close relative of the “false self described by Horney in Neurosis and Human Growth, who emphasizes “appearing” over “being” (p. 38).

Furthermore, it is almost uncanny at times the degree to which her writings anticipate those of Heinz Kohut and the self-psychologists. Horney, writing in 1939 in New Ways in Psychoanalysis, asserted that the focus on the Oedipus complex in childhood tended to obscure the importance of “early relationships in their totality . . . such parental attitudes as having real interest in a child, real respect for it, giving it real warmth. . . . such qualities as reliability and sincerity” (pp. 86-87). Heinz Kohut, in an interview with me for a 1980 New York Times Magazine article, said, “I believe we have to very, very carefully re-evaluate . . . what has been so famous as the central conflict of human beings, the Oedipal conflict. . . . Is the Oedipal conflict really the normal issue that causes all our ills later? Or is it a disintegration product when parents fail to respond with pride and with empathy to their children’s development?” (Quinn, 1980).

All the ideas I’ve discussed so far derive from the books Karen Horney wrote after she arrived in the United States in 1932. But the ideas that are most relevant to this book were propounded while she was still in Germany, in a series of 14 papers on the psychology of women (see Horney, 1967/1973). Taken together, they constitute a daring and persuasive counter to Freud’s theory of female sexual development. Had she written nothing else, these papers would have earned Horney a place of importance in the history of psychoanalysis. But because she was expelled from the club in 1941, others who appropriated her ideas got more credit than she did. “It became an increasing trend in subsequent literature,” Zenia Odes Fliegel noted in a 1972 article in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, that ideas originating with Horney and supported by [Ernest] Jones were credited to Jones.” And yet, as Fliegel notes, “in those early papers she [Horney] originated many ideas and observations which reappear in later writings on the subject—but in the fragmented and incomplete manner of the return of the repressed.” It wasn’t until 1967, when Harold Kelman compiled and translated them under the title Feminine Psychology, that these early essays began to be known and admired—most often by feminists who saw Horney as an early champion of their point of view.

I think there is no need to dwell on the phallocentric nature of Freud’s view of female sexuality. I will quote briefly from “The Ego and the Id, “just to remind you of how adamantly he insisted on the “primacy of the phallus.” “The vagina is . . . valued,” he wrote, “as a place of shelter for the penis” (Freud, 1961, p. 145). Some of his followers took up this phallocentrism with a vengeance. And one in particular, Karen Horney’s own analyst Karl Abraham, presented a paper at the international meetings in 1920 in which he catalogued the many ways in which women spent their lives trying to compensate for the missing penis. Among his more comical assertions are that women’s noses may swell up and become red because they— the noses—are responding as “a surrogate for the male genital” and that women’s pleasure in “thrusting an umbrella into the ground” or in “using a hose for watering the garden” may be unconscious expressions of the childish wish for a penis (Abraham, 1922). It is probably almost too easy to laugh at this sort of thing now. But it was part of an overall devaluation of women that persisted in psychoanalysis for a long time and still persists in some circles.

In 1922, at a meeting chaired by Sigmund Freud and no doubt attended by her own analyst Karl Abraham, Karen Horney took issue with this phallocentrism and the inferiority of the female it implied. Her 1924 paper, called “On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women,” was the first on female psychology given by a woman at an International Congress. It was a fairly mild dissent. There is one moment I love though, where she allows her indignation to bubble up: “We have assumed as an axiomatic fact,” she writes, “that females feel at a disadvantage because of their genital organs . . . possibly because to masculine narcissism this seemed too self-evident to need explanation. Nevertheless, the conclusion so far drawn . . . amounting as it does to an assertion that one half of the human race is discontented with the sex assigned to it . . . is decidedly unsatisfying, not only to feminine narcissism but also to biological science” (Horney, 1924, p. 50).

Horney’s second paper “The Flight from Womanhood” was far more ambitious and outspoken than her first. “How far,” she asks, “has the evolution of women, as depicted to us today by analysis, been measured by masculine standards and how far therefore does this picture fail to present . . . the real nature of women?” (1926, p. 324). She proceeds, through the use of a chart, to demonstrate that the ideas that have been attributed to girls about their bodies in the psychoanalytic literature correspond, strikingly, to the ideas that little boys are likely to entertain about girls’ bodies. For example, boys assume that little girls have a penis like theirs; girls are thought to believe they had a penis and to lament its loss. And so on. In other words, everything little girls are said to think is really what big boys think little girls think.

The bulk of Horney’s essay is a protest against the joyless picture of female experience that psychoanalysis has painted. “What about motherhood,” she asks rhetorically, and the “bliss” of bearing a new life, the “ineffable happiness” of expectation, the “joy” of the baby’s arrival, the “deep pleasurable feeling” of nursing and caring for a new baby. In fact, Horney continues, turning the usual arguments upside down, motherhood gives women “a quite indisputable and by no means negligible physiological superiority. “ There is reason, in fact, for men to envy women! “Womb envy” was not Horney’s phrase, but it was her concept.

As for penis envy, Horney concedes that it is readily observable in girl children—there is the “narcissistic mortification of possessing less than the boy” and also there are “manifest privileges” of having a penis—it is more visible and readily at hand for masturbation and urination.

But this childhood envy of the penis does not explain, in Horney’s opinion, some women’s tendency to disparage or flee from their femininity. The “flight from womanhood” of the title has two causes: one is anatomical, the other is social. Horney assumes that boys and girls have some awareness of their anatomy—of the vagina as well as the penis—from an early age. It is, she maintains, the girl’s oedipal fantasy—the fear of penetration by a too-big penis— that causes her to recoil from her femininity with a mixture of guilt and anxiety (Horney, 1926). Similarly, as Horney would write in a remarkably empathic paper about male experience, it is the boy’s fear of the disproportionate size of his penis in relation to his mother, and his fear of being swallowed up, which leads to the dread of women (Horney, 1932).

The second reason women flee from their femininity—and here we get to the theme which pervades all of Horney s work and makes it of a piece—the second reason is social. “The girl,” she writes, “is exposed from birth onward to the suggestion . . . of her inferiority. . . . It seems to me,” she concludes, “impossible to judge to how great a degree the unconscious motives for the flight from womanhood are reinforced by the actual social subordination of women” (Homey, 1926, pp. 69-70).

In the wake of “The Flight from Womanhood,” Horney focused increasingly on this social reality—on the effects of the predominant “male culture” on the psychological lives of women. Later, she would cast off much of the biological focus of these early papers, which were given in what I call her Freudian period. But the stress on culture, which had helped her explain women’s unhappiness with their lot, continued in the books she wrote after she crossed the Atlantic.

This brings me to the second part of my paper—the part which actually answers directly to the title, Awakened to Life: Sources of Independence in the Girlhood of Karen Horney. I hope you are convinced—if you weren’t before you started to read this book— that Karen Horney was a remarkable, independent thinker. Now I’d like to ask why? What made her decide she would be a doctor before there were any medical schools in Germany admitting women? What made her decide to undergo psychoanalysis when it was still on the fringe? What was it, inherent or learned, in her childhood, that led her to be the first, within psychoanalysis, to take issue with Freud’s ideas about women? And what was it, later on, that propelled her toward a break with the Freudians of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and led to the founding of the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Center?

The phrase “Awakened to Life” is the title of a poem Karen Horney—then Karen Danielsen—wrote at age 18 after falling in love for the first time:

Till now chasing after happiness in every form—now exultant happiness, heavenly joy in my heart.

Till now only half alive with the constant, reproachful question in my eyes of whether this is really living, this everlasting monotony? Now full, whole life, joy of life in my veins down to the littlest fingertip. (Horney, Diaries, 1980, pp. 67-68)

The idea of the poem, of course, is that she is now living intensely for the first time, thanks to love. She is “awakened to life.” But my point in using the phrase is that Karen Danielsen, born outside Hamburg in 1885, was awakened to life, absolutely aquiver with life, right from the beginning. Even in her baby picture, taken around two, her face shows a keen interest in the event of the photograph.

Her intensity is evident in the pages of her diary. She is madly in love with her teacher Herr Schulze long before she meets a boy closer to her own age. Then she thinks she shall “die of enthusiasm” over her French teacher, Fraülein Banning. She punctuates her accounts of school, of her reading, of a performance by Sarah Bernhardt, with multiple exclamation marks. And this intensity continued throughout her life—it wasn’t just adolescent excess. Once, in her sixties, after seeing a movie with a woman friend, she was so upset by the friend’s comment about the film that she walked off without her and hailed a cab, leaving the friend standing in the rain. Not very nice—you might say—but definitely intense.

Karen was born with unusual intelligence. She knew from early on that she was smart—smarter than her brother Berndt. “It was always my pride,” she wrote in her diary, “that in school I was better than Berndt” (Horney, Diaries, 1980, p. 252). When a Gymnasium opened in Hamburg, just in the year that Karen came of age to go, she despaired that she might not be able to because of her father’s reservations. “It brings me almost to the point of cursing my good gifts,” she wrote in her diary (Horney, Diaries, 1980, p. 26). But she knew she had the gifts—and eventually she and her mother convinced her father to let her go. This native intelligence is a key ingredient, I think, in Karen’s ability to be original: it allowed her to negotiate the academic aspect of medical school, where she was one of the few women, with relative ease.

Later, in Berlin, it made her quick to understand psychoanalysis: Karl Abraham wrote to Freud in 1912, “At our last meeting we enjoyed a report from Dr. Horney about sexual instruction in early childhood. For once, the paper showed a real understanding of the material, unfortunately something rather infrequent in the papers of our circle” (Abraham & Freud, 1965, p. 114). In 1932, when she came to the United States at age 47, her intelligence enabled her to quickly acquire fluency in English, to write her five theoretical books in English, and to become an enormously popular lecturer in English at the New School. Others were still struggling to pass the exam; some never did.

In young Karen Danielsen, this native abil...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Awakened to Life: Sources of Independence in the Girlhood of Karen Horney
• 2 Karen Horney s Feminine Psychology and the Passions of Her Time
• 3 Discussion of the Papers by Susan Quinn and Marianne Horney Eckardt
• 4 The Myth of the New Impotence: Update for the 1990s
• 5 Discussion of the Paper by Helen Singer Kaplan
• 6 Women’s Psychological Development: Connections, Disconnec tions, and Violations
• 7 Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls and Women
• 8 Discussion of the Papers by Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan
• 9 Discussion of the Papers by Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan
• Epilogue