Cultural Psychoanalysis: Karen Horney Pt. 1

The reflective Karen Horney, like her psychoanalytic predecessors, stood at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries. Revolutionary responses to feudalism and new visions of happiness did not end with the rise of nation-states or the slow expansion of democratic ideals. Dissatisfaction endured—in the nuclear family, in intimate relationships, and in work. Though further advances were on the horizon for women’s rights, family structures, and social supports, Horney focused on deeper sources of unhappiness: internal conflicts rooted in mortality, and a sober realism that resisted the comfort of utopian fantasy. Embarking on a psychoanalysis attuned to cultural pressures, Karen discovered that each individual contributed to those pressures based directly on how they felt about themselves. In modern parlance, we talk about “cringe” when we witness awkwardness in others. But what happens when we turn that inward—when we cringe at ourselves? For Horney, that moment revealed a critical fracture between the idealized self and the real one.

Early reflections

Karen Danielsen was born in Eilbek, east of Hamburg, Germany, on September 15th, 1885. She was the second child after her brother Berndt Jr., named after his father Berndt Danielsen, a sea captain. Their mother was Clothilde “Sonni” Danielsen, daughter of an architect and mother of aristocratic stock. That mother died at Sonni’s birth so she was raised by her stepmother, Minna. “Berndt Jr., was the adored first child and the one with looks and charm. Karen was always understood to be the smarter one and the ‘character.’ ‘It was always my pride,’ Karen wrote in her diary many years later, ‘that in school I was better than Berndt, that there were more amusing childhood stories about me than about him.'”

Sonni told her children about her sadness and how the they were a motivation for her, which would anticipate Karen’s view of the neurotic trend to move toward people as an end. “But both Karen and her brother, Berndt, must have sensed from an early age that the attentions their mother lavished on them had a somber underside. The children were, as their mother would often tell them, her only happiness. Had it not been for them she probably would not have stayed in her unhappy marriage or even, she sometimes implied, gone on living. So Berndt and Karen had to bear the weight of this grave responsibility for their mother’s happiness. Though they were loved, their childhood would have been more carefree if their parents had loved each other.”

Berndt Sr., was away on long 6 month trips bringing “railroad parts to ports in Chile and Peru, and, later, farther up the coast, in Costa Rica and Guatemala, returning with copper, and saltpeter to supply industries in Europe.” Their marriage was one of convenience since Sonni 16 years junior to Berndt Sr., “at age twenty-eight was in danger of remaining single for life, forced to live out her days in the family house or in one of the ‘homes’ run by charitable organizations for the many women in similar circumstances. In nineteenth-century Germany it was often better for a woman to compromise than not to marry at all and be permanently dependent on relatives. Certainly employment was nearly unthinkable. It was a time too when women far outnumbered men in the population. In 1867 in Bremen, for instance, more than half of those women between sixteen and fifty were unmarried.”

With the father absent and the mother imposing, Karen connected more with her grandmother Minna, who “was educated by her father alongside her seven brothers. She studied physics and Latin, subjects that were usually a male preserve, and throughout her life she maintained an interest in astronomy. There is no evidence that her stepdaughter, Sonni, received a similar education.” Karen was not very bonded with her father, considering his long travels, and she enjoyed those stretches of private time. The older stepchildren did not get along with Sonni and so there was a lot of stress when accommodations had to be made. “From time to time my girl-friends came to visit for a few days. My friends Herman and Arnold also came often. But this glorious life was to have a sudden end. In the beginning of September my stepsister Astrid, with her 5-year-old daughter, came to stay for 5 weeks. She had behaved very badly toward Mother in the past. Our idyllic life was over. It went well enough so long as Father wasn’t there, but when he came in the end of September, all hell broke loose, and up to now it has been getting worse rather than better. Astrid incites him against mother. There are daily scenes. It finally got so bad that Berndt and I didn’t let Mother out of our sight for a moment.”

Despite the happy side of life that Karen shared in her diary, she could also become very introspective, and like many later psychoanalysts, they all started with a self-analysis. For example, in her twenties, she was agonizing over dating and fighting against an inner emptiness. “Horney’s efforts at self-understanding began with her adolescent diaries. The first four, along with the letters to Oskar Horney, tell of her troubled relationship with her family, of her enthusiasm for school and ‘crushes’ on her teachers, of her intellectual and sexual awakening, and above all of her relationships with the first five men in her life: Ernst Schorschi, who introduced her to love and with whom she was infatuated for several months; Rolf, a ‘languishing Jewish youth’ who was her mentor and to whom she was deeply attached; [another] Ernst, a boarder, toward whom she felt a strong physical attraction and for whom she abandoned Rolf; Losch (Louis Grote), a fellow student and her lover during two terms in medical school; and Oskar Horney, her future husband and Losch’s friend, with whom she corresponded while she was involved with Losch.”

Karen’s situation wasn’t too different from other women. Most people compare their partner choices and worry about the one that got away. “I am so tired. I often wish everything would stop. My life is so frightfully purposeless and without content. One person! Is that asking so much? Oh God, how shall I go on enduring this emptiness? I test everyone around me more sharply, weighing them more exactly, and they are all so shallow. Rolf, why weren’t you at least left to me? Why did I have to throw you away in the blindness of my love! If only Ernst had never crossed my path! Then I would not have lost Rolf, at least not him. At times I think I must first be quite, quite alone, to be prepared for the one. But will he come, will he come?—I’m getting quite mystical in my belief, in my longing.”

When writing to Oskar, nicknamed Hornvieh, ‘little bull,’ she knew there was something wrong with her. “I have everything, everything, haven’t I, that a person could ask in order to be happy—satisfying work, love, home, natural surroundings, etc. And I take deep pleasure in enjoying everything that is offered. And yet the feeling comes creeping up more often than ever, what is all this for? Sometimes it seems to me I am freeing myself more and more from Losch, and yet he is so unspeakably dear and kind to me. But I often think: Hornvieh lives much more alone than I—how do you manage not to get tired of living? Of this eternal useless sameness!…If one is really looking for something, one also looks where there doesn’t seem to be much prospect. And at the same time I can dance nights through in self-forgetful joy…Hornvieh, do help me—I believe I am wandering in a special labyrinth and shall never get out, and see only my own picture everywhere, but always so extremely different. I shall nevertheless go to Hamburg at Easter, merely to visit you. For otherwise? In Hamburg lounging around, theater, dancing, strange faces—all that stimulates me only from time to time, and then I can have it here too.”

Almost like she was already seeking a psychoanalyst for a partner she experimented on Oskar. “I feel as if yesterday and the day before I had taken pleasure in showing you myself from an ugly side. Am I sorry? No, indeed not. For because you understand the good in me, I have a burning wish that you should know me wholly, wholly. Why is it so unutterably beneficial, the thought that somebody besides myself knows me?? Do I only want your opinion about me, my value? Hardly. But what is it then? Tell me.” Her letters could appear like a stream of consciousness to try and get a handle on her mind. “Whether this letter will turn out sensible? I doubt it. For I feel not quite fresh, and in consequence sluggish in thinking and feeling. Should not this intensive influence by something purely physical on my whole way of thinking really cease the moment I become conscious: that you now incline to splash through life in heavy rubber boots is due only to your physical fatigue!? I find it absurd—and yet I bow under the yoke. A propos thinking, ‘one’s own thinking!’ Whether I—?? Yes, unremitting, ever more refined self-observation that never leaves me, even in any sort of intoxication—then, if I have butted up against some problem, i.e., if I am myself sitting in the puddle, then I gather some ‘thoughts’ together until I am in the clear with the affair; these are so-to-speak practical problems, religious conflicts—friendship-love—love-marriage—sense and nonsense of the demands of convention. But there are countless others, aren’t there, that fumble around at the border of consciousness—and whether I can develop any so-called thinking of my own among such abstract problems, I do not know. No, absolutely not…”

“I love so to listen when you talk with me. And that brings to mind that I wanted to ask you something else, that time, but then your boozing got in the way. Remember, we were once talking about freedom of the will—and you told finally how you had come to some conclusion about the question of responsibility. And I was so tired that evening, and it didn’t penetrate into my brain. Will you tell me again?…O God, little Hornvieh, I am now in such a petit-bourgeois atmosphere of “respectability” [in English], young-lady manners, maid-servants—and talk about clothes—oh, I naturally move around in this milieu appropriately and converse exhaustively about whether Hirschfeld or Feldberg makes better suits. In the long run such an atmosphere always makes me restless, to the point of turning somersaults and the like—indeed it does. So my dear little Hornvieh—now I’m going to sleep. The matchiche melody keeps running through my mind.”

cette danse, qui nous agiche
c’est la Matchiche—

—well, good night
your Karen

Karen took a break in her diary when her father died, and after his separation from Sonni, what little she wrote of him was condescending. She also disparaged people who couldn’t introspect and were inauthentic. “My brother an extremely sharp-thinking intellectual, cool skeptic and cynic. My father a big child, whose world of ideas revolves around a strong, touchingly naïve belief in the Bible. And each of them of course considers only his own character as justified, only his own glasses through which he looks at the world! I believe there are only two things that can enrage me with people: plain, satiated philistinism and intrinsic mendacity.”

Karen’s fondness for her mother decayed as she became more thoughtful of her childhood and began using the language of psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler, after marrying Oskar in 1909 and going into analysis with Karl Abraham in 1910. Brutal resentment arose about her own child in the wake of a family friend’s tragedy: the death of Anita’s little boy. Ambivalence took over her thinking where an honest following of bread crumbs led her to compare the loss of her child, including all the goals she could achieve with the new arrival, and the freedom she would gain if the child didn’t come. “If the news has upset me so there must be an identification involved… I also had the idea that the exam is a less anxious matter than the baby [6 months pregnant with Brigitte], because one can control it better and has it in hand, but the little one could be taken from me by a thousand things against which I am powerless. And yet the emotion seems to me too great for the occasion. Is there a repressed wish behind it: that my little one should die soon like Anita’s? That I do not have this wish consciously, but am already experiencing an overflowing feeling of tenderness for the little creature, has nothing to do with it. What does the unconscious care about that? If something suppressed is involved here, it must surely be an idea that cannot become conscious, of which I would be ashamed in my conscious self or more likely would think myself incapable of. So what could my subconscious instinctual life have against the baby? For one thing, it imposes an inactivity of almost 3 months on marital intercourse. Then it disfigures me, makes me less desirable to other men; only not to Oskar, only to other men. If in addition the baby causes me to feel a stronger compulsion toward the monogamous relation, which always goes against the grain of the subconscious, it can all be summed up in one term: it is a repression of my prostitution drive.”

“A person who has no children and never will can give herself to many men with much less punishment, no burdensome consequences come of it. Not enough that it restricts vagabonding, it imposes many duties that run counter to many pleasures, curtailing time for examinations and for continuing my education. I can travel only a little or with difficulty, I can’t do all day what I want to do, but have strict duties I cannot shake. Perhaps it is going to be for me as it would be for a person who has always regulated the course of his day to suit himself and then comes into an institution where every hour is fixed by an authority. Won’t he already feel in advance a secret resistance to and hatred of this authority? Isn’t the baby a tyrannical authority of this sort that would rob me of my golden freedom? Something else occurs to me: with my present deep aversion to Sonni, I may have a resistance against finding myself in a situation that makes me resemble her: becoming a mother, as she is my mother…But of course the trouble may lie along the line of ‘masculine protest.’ Nothing is more specifically feminine than motherliness, but as I found myself inferior, being a feminine creature, and in consequence tried to be masculine, a situation that like no other keeps my femininity before my eyes and others’ must be painful to me.”

“Then new duties loom in the raising of the child. With my uncertainty and lack of self-confidence I am afraid I may not be able to fulfill them. And reflect with death wishes on the being that is piling these duties upon me. It just occurs to me that at lunch I read a story in which a man, worried about being able to support his child, wished it dead and then, when it was rescued from an actual mortal danger, could not contain himself for joy. After lunch I was so tired that I slept soundly for a good 2 hours. So perhaps the news about Anita was just a cut in an old notch; perhaps I had already identified myself with that man in the thought: everything would be so much simpler—and more enjoyable—if the baby didn’t come.”

While dealing with medical school, having a child, and navigating a marriage with depression, Karen took her psychoanalytic sessions into her hands more and more with her diary. “If I am taking up my diary again it is from the ardent endeavor to master this illness at last. So much is better than it was before. The predominance of an equable, gay mood, the even tenor of my love for Oskar, and that of my capacity for sexual enjoyment, a definitely increased self-assurance in comparison to before, together with less shyness and less tendency to defensiveness toward others—those are undoubtedly new achievements. The really severe attacks of fatigue, too, belong to the past. Yet I still have to fight against fatigue a great deal, without doubt I need an abnormal amount of sleep and hence have little capacity for work…On the other hand, I think I notice that this incapacity extends less than before to the area of other activities, so that there are fewer hours and days when I am useless for anything whatever. According to whether the freshness and ability to work are there or more or less lacking, I think of the work the future will bring me in family and profession with great joy or with trepidation and resistance. In the same way my self-confidence goes up or down accordingly.”

While dealing with low energy problems, Karen was comparing her situation of not being able to meet other people head on without value judgments and being stuck in idealization and devaluation toward acquaintances. “Problems of self-confidence in my attitude toward other people constitute the other burden under which I suffer…In this too there is no comparison with the past. But there are many indications that speak only too clearly for the existence of something that inhibits me. While Oskar enjoys getting to know a new person, especially when he approaches him with a prejudice in his favor, I am afraid of it, and in every case where the choice is up to me, I would prefer not to come in contact with him. This shyness is absolutely not accompanied by any idea that a new person couldn’t mean anything to me—no, it is present even when, and perhaps particularly strongly when, the person in question has been described to me as outstanding in some respect or important or even just as a person of great self-assurance. Then, when after seeing the person in question several times I convince myself that he isn’t so overwhelming after all, that he too is like other people, and that the indefinite fear I had of him has once more proved to have been unfounded, then an opposite tendency is apt to appear: namely that of underrating him. In any case, I tend to place him on an absolute scale of values for people that I am constantly trying to find. While Oskar simply takes a person as he is and in his great kindness lays more weight on the good in him with regard to his capacity for development than on the other, I am always quickly there with value judgments, trying to give opinions like ‘valuable’ and ‘inferior’ a definable or applicable content. Even with people I know, I avoid rather than seek association, here mostly with the idea that it is only a waste of time, nothing worthwhile would come of it. That this does in fact very often turn out to be so—at least from my point of view—is again in most cases my own fault. It is just as if I were afraid the conversation might go deep, especially that it might become too personal.”

Her last diary entry was a negative prognostication of her sessions with Karl Abraham. “It is not going well at all. Won’t I ever be getting well, completely well? I am beginning to despair of it. Most of the time it is not so bad, but I often feel as though I were paralyzed—there is a general disinclination in me. When I waken in the morning, I wish the day were already over. I still expect some relief once the pathology exam is over. Perhaps that is putting pressure on me. But I have no confidence in the influence of such rather external things. What else it can be is not clear to me. I am pretty well aware of what can happen theoretically and don’t know of anything we have not repeatedly talked about in analysis. It is probably expedient to continue the analysis.”

“Of course the analysis has helped me unspeakably—but now I want more: to be perfectly well, to be able to work one day as well as another, above all to be able to depend on my state of health. This has not been the case up to now—and the whole second analysis did not really bring me any further. This exaggerated condition perplexes me. Perhaps I want to demonstrate this to you [to make it obvious]? But if such motives can influence me, I just am not well yet. Otherwise the wish to continue the analysis could not have a pathogenic effect, and no positive or negative transference of any kind would have a decisive influence. So what more should we do in the analysis? Tread out old matters more broadly? Or: does the real work not begin till after the analysis? Something like this: the analysis shows one’s enemies, but one must battle with them afterward, day by day. I was inclined to be satisfied with the theoretical understanding. But perhaps it is only meant to put the weapons into one’s hands…”

Despite her disappointment in Karl Abraham, there were still insights into her situation and about the choices she made in her life. “Dr. Abraham says we must now have patience. Till now ideas have come with such playful ease. Now we must wait because the resistances are too great. What more can happen now? I cannot imagine what else he wants to find. He has given me many possible explanations for the states of exhaustion, the inclination to passivity that increases to a longing for sleep—even for death—the same inclination to passivity that governs my love life.” Karl Abraham’s view on masturbation was an energy loss of tension and release that could be sublimated elsewhere. “Dr. A. says that with [masturbators], after the excitement into which they work themselves, a state of exhaustion usually remains…Now masturbation plays no great role with me—I may do it at times unintentionally—but as a child I probably did it freely. Later on, in place of physical self-stimulation came the mental: the telling of stories. In its effects this is comparable to the physical stimulation. Here too exhaustion follows after the excitement. There are neurotics in whom this connection is quite simply demonstrated: they have daydreams, their thoughts gradually fly too high, their associations grow wilder, suddenly comes a moment of total emptiness, and after that a great exhaustion. The daydreams have taken the place of childish masturbation, the emptiness—orgasm—here as there, exhaustion. Of course, I don’t tell myself stories any more. But the unconscious desires this sort of satisfaction: it produces fatigue because it wants that of which the fatigue is a result.”

The important insight is that even if you masturbate only occasionally, all the tension and release experiences in your life, outside of masturbation, have the same affect related to limiting your energy. Any pleasure that is easy to access can siphon energy away. Ideal forms of pleasure have the downside of withdrawal symptoms, or clinging, or resistance, that makes it a drag when you are away from them, and therefore one has limited energy and time for priorities. Daydreaming, like Anna Freud did, consuming movies, music, books, sports, video games, social media algorithms, etc., puts the mind in a need-for-rest mode, and this is why the concentration of attention, the prioritizing of projects, and the removing of distractions from the environment, are basic requirements that allow one to channel energy where it needs to go. This can easily be seen as something that affects identity in that different objects for tension and release can crowd each other out and if one has enough impulse control, they can prune identity more skillfully towards development. Advertising, convenience, social pressure, and the intensity of stimulus can knock you off your path and change the trajectory. Repeated stimulus and conditioning can then direct attention habitually towards familiar signs and convenient pathways so that object constancy pulls you toward certain objects and makes you forgetful of other objects, even if they are better for you in the long run.

NoFap Lifestyle: Is it Worth It? – Dr. Trish Leigh: https://youtu.be/wIYngE-s4V4?si=QIqGhidw5fFjNUOd

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v61mn9e-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-1.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v6s0l1d-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-8.html

Her choice of husband, and even experiences with boyfriends, connected with early experiences, even if her eventual break with orthodox psychoanalysis and their over-emphasis on childhood influence, her formative years had an impact nonetheless. It anticipated her view that many people move against people to dominate and are attracted to those who move towards people, to be submissive. “The desire for physical and spiritual martyrdom, whence the great attraction brutal and rather forceful men exert on me, the wanting to blend in with the will of a man who has set his foot on my neck, all the same story. The shyness too in part belongs here…Dr. A. thinks this comes from my first childhood impressions, from the time when I loved my father with all the strength of my passion. I got my erotic ideal from that time. I think of the overly strong attraction Ernst exercised on me, again and again, that clumsy, brutally egotistic, coarsely sensual fellow. I have always wanted to kill my passion for him through analysis. Now I understand that all his inferior characteristics, which I kept before my eyes, did not in the least quench my passion; no, on the contrary: the instincts in me wanted such a man—and my conscious I, seeking a man of fine intelligence and discerning kindness, resisted against this in vain. In Oskar I found everything I consciously wished for—and behold: my instinctual life rebels. It feels itself drawn to a Karl U. because it scents the beast of prey in him, which it needs. To Rolf too. When we were together in those days he took an unremitting pleasure in tormenting me. Walter S. once said to him: ‘You are a sadist.’ He disputed the point at the time—but I knew Walter was right. On his birthday, when he wanted to take Tobby [teddy bear used for diaper practice] away from me and we consequently got into a fight in which he forced me to my knees and after that to lie on the floor, imperiously demanding a kiss as the reward of victory, a crimson glow almost engulfed me and in that instant I loved him. He totally lost his self-control at that moment. Oskar is always self-controlled. Even when he forces me to submit to him it is never savagery or animal brutality—he is at all times controlled, he is never elemental. For living together, certainly ideal—but something remains in me that hungers.”

Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond – WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

Babygirl | Official Trailer 2: https://youtu.be/9XXoNB0lVGo?si=HCrxMKkann822QX5

Despite Oskar seeming not as “brutal,” he was part of a culture that certainly was. She was looking for a “beast of prey” in the overall psychological makeup of any man, and if Karl Abraham was right, the biggest pleasures and peak experiences of childhood become a measure for what people look for in general life, including which partners spark a strong reaction. “Methods for raising children had not essentially changed since the nineteenth century. One very popular source book, used by and on several generations of German children, was Der Strutwwelpeter. This was a German translation of a moralistic English classic. Slovenly Peter, an illustrated book of verse originally written by an English physician for his own children. It described the mishaps and misbehavior of the child and the severe punishments meted out, in frightening detail. Parents were advised to be strict, authoritarian and punitive toward their children. This book is remembered by Karen’s children because an incident occurring in the Horney home at this time reenacted one of Struwwelpeter’s mishaps. While sitting at the Christmas dinner table Marianne tipped back her chair a bit too far and fell over backwards. Clutching the tablecloth, she pulled a brand-new dinner service and the entire Christmas dinner onto the floor. Marianne screamed loudly as Oskar spanked her in an adjoining room with a dog whip, while Brigitte too wailed in sympathy. Their little friend Rita was terrified. Karen reacted calmly—in fact, did not react accepting the whole scenario.”

Karen and Oscar were to separate in the future, but as can be seen with early choices of marriage with Karen or Melanie Klein, the desire to transcend, refine, and reach new levels eventually overtakes what was originally electric and pick it apart, fine tune things, so that when one grows out of an old template, there’s a hope that the partner can keep up and change along with the new preferences, which in many cases fails to happen. It’s actually hard for people to know what they want when they have trouble envisioning consequences, drawbacks and disadvantages. The ego-ideal of oneself, which rarely matches reality, and the erotic ideal of objects of desire, have to become familiar and boring so that the disadvantages begin to appear with more valence. Then people say, “well that’s a broken record, time for a change.” Ideals only remain an ideal during youth and inexperience until a person gains enough exposure in life to make comparisons that are more meaningful. Most people have to go through life and feel the consequences before the insight dawns on them. There comes a point where ideals can be put down as their intensity fades. The need for submission fights against the need for choice and independence. This ambivalence between submission and independence was already there at the beginning for Karen. “Some of her bitterest arguments with Rolf, for instance, were over money. She ‘couldn’t stand his paying for me.'”

The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute

Interest in psychoanalysis increased for Karen and she began attending meetings. At first, she was complimented by Karl Abraham for her adherence to the material. “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.”

Karen’s writing ability was seen first in her diary, but continued in the clear manner in how her psychoanalytic writings were able to demystify the notoriously mysterious process of psychoanalysis. One of her early presentations in 1917 demonstrated this. Like many other analysts, the bedrock is free association so that buried wishes can come to the surface gradually. This is not a simple thing at the beginning. The process requires both an analyst and analysand that can withstand repeated reactivity because even the analyst’s unconscious will be triggered by their own associations and reactions polluting the analysis. “Quite generally we may say that we require of patients a certain level of intelligence and of ethical standards. Furthermore, patients over fifty are unfavorable, because older people generally are neither willing nor able to transform all values as occurs in analysis. However, some patients over fifty who suffered from depression have been successfully analyzed…The patient must be capable of a psychologically normal state, from which the pathological material may be tackled. In other words, he must not be permanently confused or severely melancholy. It also seems that a pronounced degenerative constitution acts as a barrier to the effectiveness of analysis…We will consider as positive all cases of chronic psychoneuroses, particularly those without stormy or threatening symptoms, since analysis cannot concern itself for some time with the possible continuation of symptoms. Hence we include all kinds of obsessive neuroses, obsessive ideation, compulsions, phobias, anxiety states, somatic manifestations of hysteria or, to avoid the loaded concept of hysteria, psychogenic somatic manifestations.”

In 1917, there were still many limitations in the therapeutic technique of psychoanalysis and so certain expectations were lowered for difficult symptoms. Psychoanalysis was often a patient dumping ground when all other mental health modalities failed. This, at the time a new method, opened up stressful defenses that sometimes were the cause of diseases connected to them, and like many miracle cures, they were a low hanging fruit where catharsis was enough to resolve the problem. Rumination affected the body, or soma, and revealed a mind-body connection, but many diseases and symptoms could not be accessed by talking therapy alone. Strong rigid habits that have turned into hardened identities operate anytime a patient’s mindfulness falters and so new forms of tension and release, intention and action, would have to chip away at past identities with the patient contemplating the advantages and disadvantages, as to whether they should remain the same or make a change.

Biological situations may push back on conditioning in a way that increases futility. Any brain matter that is damaged in key areas could not, and in many cases now cannot be regenerated. At the time they didn’t understand the complexity of DNA and how it alters with experiences in the environment, like with trauma. Patients have to be able to act on what was unfulfilled and gain rewards, which come after the tension of action falls into release with success. Those habits then have to strengthen while old habits are discontinued with abstinence. How the mind responds to conditioning extinction and reward may be contingent on how much trauma damage, habitual reinforcements, and other biological determinants that resist therapy. Patients also have to be healthy enough that they don’t act out their wishes in the middle of an analysis that may hurt others. “Full-fledged perversions generally are not numbered among the treatment possibilities of psychoanalysis. Experiences with the analysis of manic-depressive states and milder cases of schizophrenia are no doubt encouraging, but clear guidelines for therapeutic indications are still missing. It would appear that the patient’s ability to establish a workable positive transference with the physician is a major prerequisite for the success of therapy…However, cases of psychoneurosis have been cured after they had resisted all other forms of therapy. Obviously, those cases that come to analysis at the present time are the most severe ones, after having already unsuccessfully tried other forms of therapy. What is unique about the effect of analysis is that not only does it free patients of their symptoms, but it removes all their inner difficulties which they had in dealing with life, and it especially helps them properly to adjust to the environment. Many a marriage that might have floundered because of the neurosis of one of the partners has become healthy through analysis, because the patient became able to direct all his forces toward his marital partner, forces that previously were fixated upon infantile models. Obviously, not even analysis can change constitution. It can liberate a person whose hands and feet were tied so that he may freely use his strength again, but it cannot give him new arms and legs. But it has shown us that many factors that we had believed to be constitutional are no more than consequences of blockages of growth, blockages which can be resolved.”

Patients also had limited funds and they had to weigh the costs and benefits with other options available, which in those early days involved sanatoria, baths and water therapy. “Freud expressly warned against any optimism [of a complete cure] by pointing out that profound psychological changes simply cannot occur overnight. The length of treatment also is hard to estimate in advance, even after a trial period of two or three weeks. This brief trial treatment, which Freud makes every patient undergo before advising him to enter analysis, is of particular diagnostic value, especially in order to separate unsuitable cases of schizophrenia from other psychogenic illnesses. The cost of treatment is rather high, in keeping with the length of time spent on it by the doctor. Nevertheless, it seldom reaches the amounts that are habitually spent for hospitalization in private sanatoria or for other forms of treatment. Nothing is asked of the patient at first but complete candor and adherence to the basic analytic rule.”

The analyst also has their own work they have to go through. Naturally, the more experience they have with patients, the data that they gather, and if they can prevent their personal situation from polluting an analysis, the better the analyst will be. “Every unresolved repression in the doctor, according to an apt expression by Stekel, amounts to a blind spot in his analytic perception. Thus Freud rightly demands that whoever wishes to practice analysis must first undergo an analysis himself or at least undertake a serious self-analysis, particularly of his own dreams…Furthermore, it is necessary that the analyst continue to analyze himself so that he be conscious of a possible counter-transference or counter-resistance.” Part of countertransference is when therapists try to avoid something new, and the hard work of discovery, by emphasizing certain associations over others. “The physician accomplishes his task by allowing all the patient’s productions to reach him with an equal interest without making a selection. The psychological situation that results makes the physician absorb the patient’s communications via his own unconscious, so that he unconsciously recognizes the connections. Thus he is able at the proper moment to reproduce all associations, dreams or data pertaining to an association. He is able to do this only if he has no resistances within himself against any insights.”

Case Studies: The ‘Ratman’ – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v435lsq-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-2.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 6: https://rumble.com/v6r3oym-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-6.html

And so this is where the work begins, the collection of a myriad of associations. “The raw material of this knowledge is supplied by the patient himself through his associations. He is asked to give his associations to a dream which he has reported or to a memory which has emerged. He is told to say everything that occurs to him, no matter whether he considers it trite, ridiculous, absurd, indiscreet or, most important, whether it might be embarrassing to him. This request for the turning off of all conscious critiques of the associations, the so-called psychoanalytic basic rule, initially is the only thing requested of the patient. It is not an easy thing to do, as will become evident to everyone who tries it. As a rule the associations do not reveal the unconscious wishes directly, but they are distorted by a kind of censorship that anxiously watched over the illicit unconscious wishes to keep them from reaching the light of day. While it is true that according to the laws of association the patient must produce in his associations material that is relevant to a defect in his actual memory, there is at the same time a strong resistance against the re-emergence into his consciousness of the repressed piece of memory. After all, he did not repress the underlying wishes for nothing, but because they were incompatible with the rest of the content of his conscious mind. It is the identical force that in the past caused the repression, i.e., the expelling from the conscious mind, that we now encounter as resistance, as soon as we try to reverse the repression. This resistance causes the associations to be distorted in many varied ways. They may, e.g., occur in symbolic disguise, or the patient may produce the most important associations in a doubting way, or he may present them as insignificant, etc.”

Dreams – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4-1: https://rumble.com/v6j1vmm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-4-1.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4-2: https://rumble.com/v6m6epl-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-4-2.html

Since the goal of therapy is to provide a safer place for blocked wishes to be expressed, than in what is typically found in judgmental family and cultural environments, there finally can be access to those embarrassing thoughts that reveal a dark side. “We know that in general there is a repressed wish behind every anxiety. When a patient tells us, e.g., that she is overly concerned about her husband, how she fears that something may have happened to him whenever he is delayed a few minutes, how she frequently leans over him at night to make sure that he is still breathing, we may suspect that she harbors intense but repressed death wishes against her husband. This in no way exhausts the phenomenon. We would ask further: What can these death wishes be traced back to?…At other times we are helped by our knowledge of symbolism, especially in our work with dream interpretation. Furthermore we may conclude without hesitation that associations which are contiguous in time belong together according to the laws of associations. Thus, when a patient associates to a dream figure and my person occurs to her, and immediately afterwards she thinks of two people who performed some services to her without charge or who gave her gifts, I can easily guess her underlying wish that I analyze her for free.”

As material bubbles up, what is conscious and unconscious are based on time gaps, missing logic when it comes to motivation, and what still doesn’t fit with the body of material already uncovered. “At other times our attention is directed to the workings of unconscious forces when we hear about wishes, decisions or opinions, the motivations of which are conspicuously weak. In such cases we know that the views in question must be based in the main upon unconscious wishes.” As information piles up, it becomes harder and harder to lie and deflect. “The chance of being lied to in analysis is not particularly great for two reasons. Firstly, most patients have a strong conscious desire for honesty. If, however, the patient tries to introduce a lie, it will have to be conceived of as another product of the psyche and no harm is done if we analyze it in the same way in which we analyze dreams. In the further course of associations the lie invariably is revealed…Furthermore, experience teaches the following: Whenever a doubt is expressed, the conclusion contained or implied in it may be disregarded and the statement taken in its positive meaning.”

Unconscious habits can also be found out when accidents happen in speech and behavior that point to a habitual wish fulfillment, whether of small or great consequence. It points to object constancy in that we direct our mind to what is interesting and tend to forget what is uninteresting, even if the uninteresting thing has the potential for great insight. One great contribution of Karen Horney was her ability to see how common unconsciousness was and to demystify what was a regular occurrence for people. “We derive further insight through symptomatic behavior on the part of patients; through actions that they perform automatically, unconsciously, without paying attention to them, and that they explain as unimportant when questioned; furthermore through mistakes that they commit, e.g., when they lose something, make a mistake in speaking or take the wrong trolley car. These faulty actions are the result of unconscious wishes that break through, often with great obstinacy. One of my patients, on her way to an analytic session, took a wrong turn on the street. Thereupon she carefully memorized the street map in order to avoid such mistakes in the future; in fact she reminded herself shortly before her next trip to pay close attention and yet she took the wrong turn at the same spot…Valuable clues are often supplied by symptoms that appear during the course of analysis. One of my patients who suffered from stomach attacks became nauseous every time she talked about her brother. The further course of analysis revealed that the symptoms were connected with childhood memories in which the brother played the main role.”

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtl55-the-psychopathology-of-everyday-life-sigmund-freud.html

The process gets patients to begin seeing themselves with the same clarity as a partner living with them who detects changes without fail. “You may picture the situation as though the patient had locked his unconscious instincts, like strange animals, behind a high wall over which he no longer can look. He does not know the animals any more but he is bothered and frightened by their noise. The physician, on the other hand, is able because of his knowledge to distinguish the different voices, to identify the animals and to whom they belong…What is needed is helping him take down the wall little by little. That way the animals can get out, and he may tame them or put them in a cage where they no longer bother him. This means that he may admit to consciousness those instincts hitherto unknown, he may affirm them, reject them or sublimate them.”

There’s a split between the more human side of the personality, with attitudes of a disembodied self that has total and complete agency, and the animal side that is endlessly looking for gratification in every nook and cranny. One has to acknowledge the other to reduce unconscious surprises and eruptions that compromise conscious ethical goals. “The wall that bars access to his unconscious instincts is called resistance. This resistance wall, which in analysis we must laboriously take down brick by brick, is defended by the patient in two ways: by the conscious ego, which does not wish to admit those primitive infantile instincts, and by the unconscious, which does not wish to give up the gratification which it derives from the activity of its instinctual life. Hence it is the main task of psychoanalysis to remove those resistances by means of uncovering them.”

The patient has to be led by their associations so as to facilitate their ability to entertain a repressed wish, no matter how brutal, like the autobiographical example Karen provided in her diary about wanting to regain her freedom from her pregnancy. Awareness did not lead her to take such actions, since she did keep her children, but awareness releases the resistance so that the effort binding the need for confession can relax. Acceptance of a common death wish allows awareness to consider the actuality of acting on such wishes and see the consequences. The sober mind can make a pro and con analysis, as well as predict what the future would look like, especially on how they would feel about the consequences, and therefore process the material. Unprocessed, unconscious materials aim for short-term gratification without high level discernment. That’s why there is so much internal and external conflict. And it’s partly the reason why people go into therapy, because of all the relationship betrayals, cultural pressures, reactions and counter reactions to different people, and long-standing wishes that go unfulfilled. Unconscious attitudes waste time for a person and may mean they drop out of life, become ill, or possibly hurt others in relationship quagmires. As Karen will later explore, cultural pressures require certain standards before people can enter into love and or work relationships, but many of those standards are unrealistic and repressive.

The Day a Pig Fell into the Well | Trailer – Hong Sang-soo: https://youtu.be/n8NIIaQFOnU?si=-Ea9PlhfYNJIiHVi

The Id in the mind responds to expediency, convenience, and without patience or any care for mental peace, balance, and conflict avoidance. That’s why psychoanalysis calls these desires infantile. Like in Buddhism, desire only knows peace from gratification. It needs contemplation to enjoy the peace of inaction that avoids consequences, or it needs a positive goal that replaces the usual negative space connected with denial of gratification. It allows for healthy forms of inaction and avoidance that feel like a positive goal fulfillment. “Everything that hinders the progress of analysis is a resistance, omitting of course purely external obstacles. We can assume resistance is present when a patient arrives late, when he does not show up at all for insufficient reasons; when nothing occurs to him; when he sins against the psychoanalytic basic rule, i.e., to say everything that comes up; when he no longer dreams or when he produces dreams of such a volume that their accounting occupies the whole hour, when he complains for half an hour about the lack of progress instead of using the time to get on with the work, and when he suddenly begins to talk about the furniture, etc. Some patients try to distract the doctor from themselves by involving him in critical discussions about psychoanalysis or other topics; other patients become tired or fall asleep. Insights that had been gained are later denied, which is one of the reasons why psychoanalysts are just as hard to analyze as other mortals.”

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4-1: https://rumble.com/v6j1vmm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-4-1.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4-2: https://rumble.com/v6m6epl-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-4-2.html

All dead ends are important bits of information as well because they tell us what material was present when they went off track into denial or distraction. Karen like most psychoanalysts, prized defenses connected with memories of people that are now redirected to the therapist in a transference. “…The first task is to recognize a resistance as such and not to overlook it. Then it is necessary to help the patient to the insight that we are dealing with a resistance, which fact had not been clear to him in most cases. Finally, we have to uncover the causes of the resistance and so eliminate it. In a schematic way, we may say that we have to dig in two directions for the sources of resistance…Firstly, resistances appear if we get close to a repressed complex, and more intensely the more forceful the repression has been. Secondly, resistances are encountered which are based upon the relationship of the patient to the doctor. These latter resistances are the more important ones. It is fair to say that they participate to a greater or lesser extent in every resistance.”

Libido, or craving, is a hunger that the analyst is trying to detect, as well as the skill level at which the hunger is adept at. Naturally, the skill levels will be lower than that of a healthy adult, which is why they have not been satisfied as of yet. “Every person, by this constitution as well as through childhood impressions, has acquired his own peculiar way of conducting his love life, of setting conditions for it, for choosing what instincts are to be satisfied and what goals are to be pursued. These unique tendencies will determine to a certain extent the character of each new relationship. In every person, but more so in the neurotic, a significant portion of these tendencies remains unconscious and unfulfilled. The patient whose need for love has remained largely unfulfilled moves toward every new person, including the physician, with expectations of being loved. He transfers on to the doctor not only conscious emotions such as liking, trust, etc., but also unfulfilled and unconscious love needs. This phenomenon, called transference, is not characteristic of analysis alone, but occurs with every psychological treatment of neurotics. With the other treatment modalities it simply is not uncovered as much nor traced back to its sources as it is in psychoanalysis. When we succeed, as treatment progresses, to free the [craving] which is fixated upon the infantile models, this liberated [craving] will now be [emotionally invested] at first upon the physician.” In a controlled therapy room, “…all instinctual tendencies are transferred to the doctor. Next to tender desires, and sometimes even covering them up, are hatred and defiance, thirst for power, and destructive impulses directed against the physician.”

The territory of therapy is where the wishes are unconsciously stuck in the pleasure principle and when they finally become conscious to the patient, automatically entering the reality principle. Sober reality shows that people we may desire may not desire us, for example. They may be inaccessible because of power differentials. We may not be able provide what they want in exchange for a relationship. We may desire things that damage ourselves and others. A perfect example is when we fall in love with a celebrity on the screen. There’s a suspension of disbelief that allows the entertaining of these ideas, hence the term entertainment. In the mode of entertainment unconscious demands want gratification in the moment. Disbelief in sober awareness stops being suspended and a grounding in reality returns. “A moderate degree of transference is at first favorable for the progress of therapy, be it analytic or other types. After some time, however, it is this very transference which becomes the most powerful weapon of the resistance. This is so in regard to three main factors. In the first place, it is obvious that the patient feels embarrassed, at least consciously, about telling the doctor when tender or hostile feelings toward him rise to the surface…This often leads to silence on the part of the patient because he does not want to communicate these associations which, nevertheless, keep impinging upon his awareness. Still more frequently, those instincts which are in the process of being uncovered at that particular stage of therapy attach themselves to the person of the doctor even prior to their becoming conscious and demand fulfillment from him, again unconsciously. The content of the transference wishes thus changes with the stage of analysis, but the tendency remains the same, i.e., to transform them into actuality, as long as they are unconscious, and all this without any concern for reality. This leads to a resistance, a blockage, which may be expressed in the language of the unconscious as follows: I do not wish to be analyzed further, but rather want the doctor to fulfill my wishes. The physician will recognize the presence of a resistance, and if he focuses on presenting transference difficulties, he will successfully uncover from the patient’s associations his transference wishes and so resolve them.”

The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

List – Hong Sang-soo: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2947260/

Plato: Lysis: https://rumble.com/v6vs8dr-plato-lysis.html

Reality has a way of getting people to let go of being hooked by a desire because consequences naturally arise, and in pernicious desires, the working through process of analysis provides repeated doses of reality to help the patient unhook from impossible objects which force them to look elsewhere for viable options. Energy stops being wasted in entertainment over the impossible and the patient sees the benefit. “A further piece of resistance has been broken down and a piece of unconscious psychic life has become conscious, not only to the physician but also to the patient, and the latter is what counts…The negative transference which in a very special way lends itself to resistance, hostile, defiant tendencies which, according to the infantile thought processes of the unconscious, do not wish to do the doctor the favor of making progress. Once such a resistance has been overcome by having made it conscious, therapy proceeds smoothly and the patient will spontaneously produce additional pathogenic material…The physician’s ability at interpreting is not the most important skill, but rather his early recognition and removal of resistance. A resistance that has been overlooked and an unrecognized transference may easily lead to failure in therapy, while an incorrect interpretation tends to correct itself. The transference may be likened to a strong magnet which initially attracts the instinctual forces that are hidden in the depths where they do their damage. It performs an invaluable service in therapy in that it actualizes and makes manifest those repressed and forgotten instincts.”

The therapeutic room and environment confronts healthier patients to not act on their desires and puts them in the mode of contemplation so that when they leave the psychoanalytic space, they are less likely to act out consciously in the real world before the analysis has penetrated deep enough. “It is therefore mainly in the area of the transference that the battle between the patient’s unconscious and the physician is fought, the patient trying to realize those wishes that he unconsciously directs on to the physician, while the physician in turn forces him to content himself with insight only.” When the patient becomes aware of their reactions towards people of authority and sees how they take past experiences and make predictions with total strangers, the muscle tension to react can now be relaxed in awareness in contemplation of sober reality. “This gaining of insight leads at the same time to the gradual resolution of the transference. I have often been asked how mere insight can have such an effect. The answer is rather simple. Most of these wishes are infantile and they no longer strike us as desirable once they have become conscious. In consciousness powerful opposing forces are at work which generally are stronger than those primitive desires so that, to quote Freud, repression may be replaced by conscious condemnation. Furthermore, we must consider that particularly those desires that come out of the deepest layers of the unconscious are so excessive, so fantastic and grotesque that they cannot stand up to the clear light of day.”

When the patient sees their reaction as actually impersonal, inaccurate, and scapegoating towards the doctor, as well as other people in the family and acquaintance circle, their dependency on those people begins to wane. “The instinctual forces that have been liberated from the unconscious should not remain forever tied to the physician, but must become free to be used in real life. Hence the dissolution of the transference is a further condition for a cure. For this reason we avoid all that might tie the patient more than necessary to the doctor or might even cause a permanent dependency.”

Part of the reason why a patient must be selected carefully is related to the assessment as to whether they are capable of learning from insight. This puts less pressure on the analyst to be an educator and provides maximum freedom for the patient to avoid dependency so they can chart their own course, and parent themselves. Typically, when a person has a desire made conscious and there are no impossible obstacles in the way, they are already motivated and there’s no need to ask for help. “…There is the question whether the doctor should try to influence the patient in an educational fashion or, as the problem is often expressed, whether analysis should be followed by synthesis. The next question is inseparable from the former, i.e., what attitude the analyst should take in relation to the patient’s actual conflicts. The patient, in his infantile orientation toward the doctor, usually asks for advice. The analyst, on the other hand, reminds himself that most conflicts cannot be understood without bringing out in the open the instinctual forces that are unconsciously operating. He knows that he will serve the patient better by limiting himself to simply helping the patient clarify the motives that drive him toward this or that decision. This will enable the patient to make his decision all by himself.”

Already at this early stage of psychoanalysis is an awareness of the environment and how it can reward and punish in cultural ways that undermine the therapy, as well as perverse incentives that attach to the therapeutic setting. Patient’s can’t leave therapy without being conscious of cultural pressures that keep them unhealthy. Habits have developed after years of conditioning and the culture will likely reinforce them again. There are also incentives for malingering where the patient has some reward in being sick and wishes to remain that way. “Even after therapy has been terminated, improvement often does not occur immediately but manifests itself after some time. The reasons for this are manifold. A real difficulty blocking a definitive cure is the patient’s gaining an advantage from his illness which he does not wish to forego, e.g., when a woman who is married to a callous husband will obtain more consideration from him by virtue of her suffering…It is well known that a course of psychoanalytic treatment requires a long time. Freud figures that in general it takes six months to a year, possibly longer in severe cases, with one treatment a day.” Despite Karen saying that “it certainly would be highly desirable to shorten the duration of treatment,” habits can easily overtake short-form therapies that don’t have enough time to make resistant enough grooves in the mind.

The success of the treatment is also based on resonance. Patients forced to accept cookie-cutter interpretations and theories will leave therapy unchanged. The material must come out of the patient’s own mind and uncontrolled associations so as to have them take ownership of their insights. “The question now arises as to when we should first tell the patient anything about his unconscious wishes. Freud has given us a precise rule to answer this question: Not before a workable transference relationship has been established and then not until resistance has for the first time taken over the transference. For the first communication to the patient as well as for all subsequent ones we make it a rule to proceed with the utmost caution and to say something only when the patient has arrived near the repressed complex through his own insight. Otherwise we provoke unnecessary resistances or meet with a complete lack of understanding. It is as though we were to confront a person in his everyday life with his unconscious motives, e.g., if we were to tell an overprotective mother that she harbors death wishes against her children. This would lead to nothing but bitterness which would be all the greater the more accurate our evaluation.”

When the patient arrives with a puzzle, they may desire the analyst to solve it entirely themselves, but patients are really there to find a space where all the puzzle pieces can be found, which is helped by the analyst, and the therapeutic result will better serve the patient when they can arrive at their own conclusions authentically as to where the pieces fit. The big picture arises in the mind of the patient autonomously and eliminates any doubt. “But since in analysis we do not say anything until the patient can almost grasp it with his own hands, we have a chance to talk about sexual topics, for example, without hurting the patient, and much more easily than is the case in a non-analytic setting. The reaction that occurs upon such a communication has to be well understood. There may be an immediate insight which the patient admits with a feeling of relief. Or, agreement may manifest itself by the sudden disappearance of a symptom which had occurred during treatment. In other cases the patient may confront the doctor with a conscious ‘no’ and yet bring in relevant associations that lead him to the proper insight. In some cases where the physician has not hit the mark, the patient’s criticism may be awakened which reveals that the patient knows better, and after a few associations will bring about the solution to the riddle.”

By being a woman herself in the early part of the 20th century, Karen had to deal with her own professional obstacles and the masculine orthodoxy of Freudian thought—all while responding to the recurring patterns she saw in her own patients. She began by investigating the cultural pressures surrounding love, and eventually expanded her inquiry to include work, identity, and self-realization. Her work remains crucial today, as technology has advanced to the point where many now experience life in a state of digital abstraction. She would want us to move from the digital fog into analog aliveness. When people begin to face their predicaments without escapism, avoidance, or numbing, they can mourn the loss of their idealized selves. The pain that emerges—often sharp and deep due to years of repression and turning away—can, once acknowledged, release its hold. And when that happens, the need to escape lessens. People become more patient with reality as it is. They turn toward their emotions with presence, learning to recognize and feel into them. What once felt like protection—avoidance, distraction, defense—is revealed to be ineffective. The energy that was trapped in fantasy or fear is now liberated for something deeper: realism, human imperfection, and a life open to reality testing, surprise and integration.

A Mind Of Her Own: The Life Of Karen Horney – Susan Quinn: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780201155730/