Cultural Psychoanalysis: Karen Horney Pt. 5

Fromm Europe With Love

Being in an intellectual setting with plenty of colleagues to converse with, it was predictable that Karen’s next important intimate relationship would be from the same group of people. “Karen Horney had known Erich Fromm and his wife, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, in Berlin, where all three had studied psychoanalysis. Fromm had been analyzed by Hanns Sachs and had practiced analysis in Berlin, beginning in 1930. In 1933, when he visited Chicago as a guest lecturer, his friendship with Horney, who was fifteen years older than he was, intensified. Over the next decade it is impossible to sort out Fromm’s influences on Horney from her influences on him in the writing they each produced. It was during the Chicago years that Fromm and Horney’s intellectual relationship deepened into a romantic one.”

Just as Chicago was becoming a haven for Europeans, New York was much the same as the build up to World War II was advancing. “Fromm came to New York the same year Horney did, and joined the faculty of the International Institute of Social Research, which had been transplanted from Frankfurt to Columbia University. It is possible that Horney chose to move to New York and brave the orthodox psychoanalytic climate because of Fromm. But this can be only a conjecture, since no correspondence between Fromm and Horney has survived. Friends from the early New York days, however, remember them as constant weekend companions. The psychologists Ernest and Anna Schachtel, who arrived in New York a year later, spent many weekends with Fromm and Horney and traveled with them to Lake Tahoe, to Monhegan Island, and later to Horney’s country house in Croton. And Karen Horney’s first two books, written during the early New York years, are laden with references to Fromm’s works, published and unpublished. Some whispered that Horney was getting all her ideas from Fromm. The exchange, however, was anything but one-sided. The two were intertwined, emotionally and intellectually, in a relationship that must have fulfilled, perhaps for the first time in Horney’s life, the dream of a marriage of minds, which she had envisioned in her letters to Oskar thirty years before.”

Like a melting pot, there was a desire to bring Europe to America and make newcomers feel at home. “And then there was New York itself, a city almost as lively and cosmopolitan as Berlin. Right away, with the help of Renate, who came along to get her settled, Karen managed to find an apartment in the Essex House, overlooking Central Park, which nearly replicated the location of her last apartment in Berlin, at the edge of the Tiergarten. New York, in fact, was becoming more like Berlin all the time, as more and more Jews, along with some non-Jews, fled Germany. Beginning in 1934, New York had its own German language newspaper, the Aufbau. The Upper West Side was filling up with Viennese coffeehouses, and across town on the Upper East Side, in Yorkville, it was possible to choose among several German-language movie houses, to buy German books and Christmas ornaments, and to read German papers over a slice of Sachertorte at the Café Geiger. Increasingly, as Hitler’s threats became policies, the intellectuals of Weimar Germany and Austria were arriving in New York. They were ‘a group of immigrants,’ as a New Republic writer observed at the time, ‘unlike any the world has seen before—individuals of such distinction that never, under ordinary circumstances, would they dream of transplanting themselves.'”

New York provided Karen the opportunity to expand her quality of friends and her success provided for a good standard of living. “In Chicago most of Karen’s social life had been contained within the small psychoanalytic community. In New York, with Fromm at her side, she found non-analyst friends in the newly arrived German intelligentsia. Among them was the theologian Paul Tillich, a non-Jew who couldn’t stomach Hitler and who had come to New York, with his wife, Hannah, at the invitation of the Union Theological Seminary. The Tillichs often got together with Karen for dinner at her apartment, since her analytic practice afforded her more luxury than they had. There was always very good wine, from a wine seller Karen had discovered on her corner, and carefully selected cheeses. They would talk about films and books and ideas, all in German of course. Karen, as Hannah Tillich remembers, was particularly interested in Paul Tillich’s philosophical ideas: the two of them would argue at times, with Karen occasionally teasing ‘Paulus,’ as his friends called him, about his feelings of ‘omnipotence.’ More often, however, ‘she was the one who listened and drew out the other people.'”

The celebrity gatherings were beginning to take Karen into a wealthy bubble that threatened to make her feel special and unique, but out of touch. “The evenings were hardly so solemn as this suggests, however. One night, at the apartment of Paul and Marga Kempner, the socializing took a farcical turn. The Kempners, who had been wealthy in Berlin, were making the best of their greatly reduced circumstances in Manhattan. Marga Kempner, who was a descendant of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, told Hannah Tillich that she loved small houses ‘because she had only lived in large ones.’ Nonetheless, even in the Kempners’ small apartment there were, as Hannah remembers, ‘a lot-of Monets and Manets on the walls.’ Marga Kempner ‘had one thing she made—a chicken fricassee I think it was. She was not used to cooking, but she cooked this one thing very well.’ On this particular evening the fricassee was supplemented by wine tasting, and the guests included not only Karen Horney and the Tillichs but the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque. All, but particularly Karen and Paulus, were getting quite drunk. Somehow or other the conversation came around to Salvador Dali, whom Remarque knew to be staying in New York at the time. When Hannah Tillich said she admired Dali and would like to meet him, Remarque insisted that they seek him out. So they all took a cab to a luxurious hotel and summoned who appeared looking very stiff and formal—and quite sober—in white tie. By that time Karen and Paulus were so thoroughly drunk they couldn’t talk—every time they looked at each other, they went into paroxysms of giggling. Remarque and Hannah Tillich desperately tried to ignore them and make polite conversation. But Dali, understandably nonplussed, soon left their company. At that point Remarque shepherded the drunken party out of the hotel and hailed a police car to take them home. But the policeman must have found them insufferable too: he drove them only around the corner, where they all fell into a taxi.”

At the time in the 1930s, it’s important to know that many pleasures, like alcohol, drugs, and pornography were often made illegal but circulated underground. The world of the underground maintained the connection between modern people and their archaic animal Id impulses. Most movies at the time portrayed adults in black and white or Technicolor, and outside of drinking, smoking, talking, dressing glamourous and getting into fights, it was hard to imagine any of them going to the bathroom or having sex. These underground pornographic materials included Tijuana Bible comic books, Stag or French Postcards, and Stag films which were viewed in private parties, men’s clubs, and underground theaters. Projectionists, bootleggers, and brothel operators were trusted in the supply chain, including subgenres, like erotic hypnosis. Many of the depicted sex acts were what people wanted to explore but never admit to, like what property owners would like to do to the butler, the maid, and the gardener, but sexuality was rigidly compartmentalized, like switching between Superman and Clark Kent, or Jekyll and Hyde. For example, mail order systems would label packages under sanitized categories like “art studies,” or “figure photography.” Postal services cracked down repeatedly on these secret networks and operations would have to relocate and start again. They also cracked down on birth control and abortion materials at a time where underground abortion was widespread.

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

As described above, Karen’s lifestyle, and those of her friends, were not cheap and the competition between colleagues to garner accolades and funding would tempt rivalry. “Factions seem to have developed almost from the start, with Thompson and Fromm angered that most of the new students were taken into analysis by Horney. Horney in turn (according to several students) appeared to resent Fromm’s popularity with students. And in the spring of 1943, when students requested that Fromm teach a clinical course in the institute program (he had been teaching only at the New School until then), these rivalries erupted into an open disagreement over whether Fromm, who was not an M.D., should be allowed to teach such courses to candidates in analytic training. Horney took the position that allowing a nonphysician to teach clinical courses would make it more difficult for their institute to be accepted as a training program within New York Medical College. But Fromm and his supporters, most notably Clara Thompson and Harry Stack Sullivan, pointed out that in fact no one at New York Medical College had raised any objections to a lay teacher…In April of 1943, when the question was put to a vote in the faculty council, Horney’s position prevailed. Fromm, who had in fact been functioning as a training analyst in the privacy of his office, where he was analyzing and supervising students, was officially deprived of training status. As a result, he resigned, along with Clara Thompson, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Janet Rioch, one of the candidates who had left the New York Psychoanalytic at the time of the first split. Together, they immediately made plans to start an alternative institute.”

Even Karen’s daughter was not convinced that the disagreement was merely academic, and the ghost of Freud’s gatekeeping returned. “After a lecture by Dr. Viola Bernard on peptic ulcer, nonmembers of the association were asked to leave because ‘Dr. Horney had a special message for us.’ Horney came forward ‘with Dr. Robbins on one side and Dr. Silverberg on the other’ to explain the circumstances surrounding Fromm’s resignation. She explained that as a lay analyst he might jeopardize the association’s affiliation with a medical school. Moulton tried to present a counterargument. ‘I pointed out that our group had given up prestige and status once for the right of free scientific discussion and that it seemed very odd that a liberal group should take this kind of stand only two years later…Horney’s daughter Marianne, in a paper written thirty-five years later and entitled ‘Organizational Schisms in American Psychoanalysis,’ noted that ‘the arguments presented at the time by Horney, Robbins, and Silverberg fail to convince, even on rereading, that lay analysis was the sole issue…Ruth Moulton suggested in a talk many years later that the appearance of Fromm’s first book in English, Escape from Freedom, in 1941 may have aroused Horney’s jealousy, particularly since Fromm drew praise and attention from the same lay audience that admired Horney’s work. Fromm was, in any case, the only teacher on the faculty who had Horney’s kind of charisma. She remembers that once, introducing him, Horney slipped and called him ‘Dr. Freud’ instead of ‘Dr. Fromm.’ Everyone laughed at the time, but it was only a few months later that Horney led the group that ousted him.”

Each side of the story brought in the typical reasons being that of jealousy or a fear of engulfment, which was common for professionals in a generation that valued self-development above all else. “What Thompson and others surely knew but didn’t say is that Karen Horney and Erich Fromm had had an intimate relationship for years, beginning around the time they both arrived in New York in 1934 and ending in the early forties. Their breakup, like the relationship itself, is veiled in mystery. But Horney’s secretary, Marie Levy, remembers Horney confiding to her that it was over and that Fromm was a ‘Peer Gynt type.’ Since Horney was writing about Peer Gynt in Our Inner Conflicts around the time of this comment, it is possible to elaborate a little on what she meant. The Peer Gynt maxim, according to Horney, is ‘To thyself be enough…Provided emotional distance is sufficiently guaranteed, he may be able to preserve a considerable measure of enduring loyalty. He may be capable of having intense short-lived relationships, relationships in which he appears and vanishes. They are brittle, and any number of factors may hasten his withdrawal.’ As for sexual relations, ‘he will enjoy them if they are transitory and do not interfere with his life. They should be confined, as it were, to the compartment set aside for such affairs.’ Or, ‘He may have cultivated indifference to so great a degree that it permits of no trespassing.'”

There can be various factors, but when people are competing in the same territory while trying to be collaborators, it’s a dangerous place to be. “Horney’s version of Peer Gynt/Erich Fromm suggests that the relationship with Fromm may have ended because she wanted more from him than he was willing to give. Might she have suggested marriage, for instance, and scared him off? On the other hand, however, Fromm couldn’t have been entirely averse to marriage, since he married twice after his relationship with Horney ended. Perhaps, since both his subsequent marriages were to younger women, he was looking for a less powerful partner. Horney was fifteen years older than he, had published more books, and was better known at the time. Even though his first wife, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, had been older and further along in her career as well, he may have wanted a different sort of second marriage. It is also true that Horney herself possessed many of the attributes of the Peer Gynt type. Could her typing of Fromm have been a projection? Was it she, not he, who backed off when the relationship reached a certain level of intimacy? What is known is that Karen Horney was deeply hurt when the relationship ended. Ernst Schachtel, with whom Fromm and Horney had vacationed in Maine and the West, remembers her coming to him before the split in the association occurred and announcing that she didn’t want to continue their friendship unless Schachtel stopped seeing Erich Fromm. ‘I was surprised she would make such a condition,’ he recalled later. ‘I continued to see him, because we were old friends…I think she was deeply hurt by Erich Fromm.’ Only a deep personal injury seems consistent with Horney’s behavior in the association quarrel. She was capable, in other instances, of remaining socially pleasant to adversaries. She even remained on cordial social terms with Lawrence Kubie after the New York clash…”

“Marriage won’t make me love you more” | Out of Africa: https://youtu.be/Fh89F6aYHRk?si=mIBaJrHi8qBidksx

The added pressure of blending families and interfering influences affecting the children could possibly have added more resentment to the mix. Was Karen better with her children or Erich Fromm? Like Melanie Klein analyzing her children, many other psychoanalysts made the same mistake with theirs by introducing analysis, which requires professional distance, into relationships that are too close where advice for children is mixed with conflicts of interest and rivalry. “There was another complicating dimension of Karen Horney’s relationship with Fromm during these years. At Horney’s suggestion her daughter Marianne had entered into psychoanalysis with Fromm, beginning in 1936 and ending in 1940. To be treated by a man so deeply involved with one’s mother would seem to present insuperable difficulties. Even though Freud analyzed his daughter Anna, and Marie Bonaparte’s son was analyzed by her lover Rudolph Loewenstein, therapists generally don’t try to treat people with whom they have such highly charged connections…In a talk given years later Marianne confided that her analysis changed her life. Before analysis, she had been pleasant, conscientious, even-tempered, liked, but detached and without close friends. After two years of analysis, she experienced irritation, not only with her analyst, but also with the artificiality of her relationship with her mother. This was followed by a wish for closer relationships and resulted in new friendships and, a year after the analysis, meeting her future husband and embarking on a ‘rich, meaningful’ life, including ‘two marvelous daughters.’ The analysis had not provided a ‘cure’ but had ‘unblocked…the capacity for growth.’ Marianne believes that Fromm was able to help her not only because he was ‘warm, kind, wise, and very generous‘ but also because he had been a good friend of her mother’s for many years, and knew her ‘erratic relatedness or unrelatedness to people.‘ As a result, he was able to ‘affirm a reality which I had never been able to grasp.’ For Karen Horney the success of Marianne’s analytic work with Fromm was a mixed blessing, since it meant that for the first time Marianne expressed some of her unhappiness to her mother. Marianne remembers ‘one outburst’ and another occasion on which she ‘criticized her openly.’ But for the most part Marianne simply became more distant. Karen apparently blamed the changes in Marianne on Erich Fromm, whom she suspected of ‘projecting his antagonism to her onto me.’ Although Marianne insists this was absolutely not the case, it is easy enough to see how Horney’s hurt feelings about her breakup with Fromm might be compounded by Marianne’s newly critical attitude.”

In the end, it was ironic that Karen defended her school, in much the same way she criticized Freud for doing, and she went after heretics ruthlessly. “In a letter of resignation Ralph Crowley wrote: ‘The A.A.P….is founded basically on the idea that purge and punishment should be outlawed if done to Horney, while they are all right if done to someone else.‘” Even when Karen wanted to be associated with the medical framework, that also became an impasse too. “The proposal to sponsor psychoanalytic training within a department of psychiatry, Judd Marmor wrote later,

appeared to present a significant and historic opportunity to bring psychoanalysis into the framework of organized medical education. Not only would we be reaffirming the roots of psychoanalysis in medical practice, but also we would be bringing it into a university setting, where academic freedom was a long established and hallowed principle…Horney’s great reluctance seemed to confirm fears of some that what Horney wanted to do, consciously or unconsciously, was to perpetuate her own particular school of thought rather than sponsor an open system of psychoanalytic training. Although most of us admired her tremendously, we did not wish to be her disciples or anyone else’s.

The end goal that these professionals desired, and still do to this day, is to take the influences that they wanted from others, find funding by differentiating themselves, and then they pursued their own avenues to gain an uncritical audience of fans to maintain that funding. Scientists need to eat! Deep differences and energetic criticisms motivated messages to the rebellious to follow the same path and get out to start their own school. Disciples provide money, and the funding provides freedom for the school to follow their own line of investigation. The advantage is that if the science is rigorous enough, new theories can be generated without spurious criticisms from the too easily ambitious, but the danger would be self-indulgence, and institutions can turn into cults if there are no checks to power. Loyal disciples have to watch themselves so as to not accidentally make a wrong turn when advocating for their masters. “The AAP’s institute continued to require medical degrees as a prerequisite for analytic training, and the training requirements were as rigorous as those at the New York Psychoanalytic. (Four years of course work, a personal analysis, two supervised analytic cases, and a thesis were required for graduation.) The faculty, which tended to be recruited right out of graduating classes, must have suffered from lack of experience. And yet the institute continued to grow, especially after 1946, when a new generation of psychiatrists, back from the war and innocent of psychoanalytic quarrels, were attracted to the AAP program in increasing numbers. Kelman also contributed to the success of the Auxiliary Council, a group of supportive laymen who came in large numbers to hear lectures by Horney and others and who contributed significant financial support.”

Followers walking on a knife edge also have to force students to be just as exacting with what they had learned, and proselytize without that important independent thought that generated the new theories in the first place. “Although he was an effective administrator, however, Harold Kelman was less successful in the classroom and in the consulting room. Dr. Henry Holt, who was sent to Kelman for analysis when he entered training at the institute, describes his treatment as ‘long but unhappy. The man was to my mind very rigid and obsessive-compulsively involved with theoretical matters. And he had very little capacity for true warmth.’ Kelman had some of ‘the best students at the institute,’ and was ‘very bright and well-educated’ and a ‘true lieutenant of Horney’s,’ in fact taught ‘the gospel according to Horney.’ But in class he could be unpredictable. He once blew up at a candidate and called him an SOB in front of the class because he had bought a book from a bookstore instead of, as Kelman thought proper, buying it through the association. When Esther Spitzer took a course on dreams with Harold Kelman, she was warned not to ask questions. ‘He was so arrogant,’ she remembers; ‘he talked down to you.’ Once, sitting in someone else’s lecture, Harold Kelman got up, announced he was wasting his time, and walked out. Harmon Ephron, looking back on the history of the association, believes that allowing Harold Kelman to rise to power as a ‘colossal mistake.’ People who knew Kelman doubt that his relationship with Horney was primarily sexual; many got the impression that Kelman, who never married, was either asexual or homosexual. But he seems to have provided something Horney hungered for, particularly in later years: unquestioning adoration. ‘She was seduced by people who worshiped her,’ Judd Marmor claims. ‘That was very important to her. And Kelman was a bachelor, he had no family, and he devoted himself constantly to her, he was at her beck and call. He was a strange man, a bright man, not without ability…his personality was a little odd.’ ‘Kelman played vassal,’ another student remarked, ‘to Horney’s queen. Each needed and used the other.'”

Like a military outfit, underlings learn the hard way that they are just there to follow orders. If classes continued on without painstaking confirmation of the curriculum, there was a danger that a schism could sneak in unawares. Happiness then is a world functioning without conflict, in total harmony, but that is not the world of science. Colleague confirmation of success and student fandom, was the pleasure that psychoanalysts were hoping to enjoy. That was the sweet spot when they replaced gatekeepers of the old standard, but before they turned into gatekeepers themselves, and then in turn were pushed aside by newer theorists later on. “Kelman’s devotion to Horney, however, seems to have been genuine. After her death he described his ‘sheer pleasure’ at seeing her happy during the period from around 1944 to 1948, when things were going well at the institute and ‘all was well with the world.’ ‘It was like a child bursting into delight with themselves and with life…It happened rarely before and it happened rarely after. But it was there.’ When, sometime after that happy period, Horney began to criticize Kelman, he was devastated. Morris Isenberg, an AAP-trained analyst, remembers Horney taking Kelman to task in front of students, following a course on dreams, telling him, ‘This is your own theory, not mine.’ Afterward, in the car driving home, Kelman was very shaken and confused and close to tears. Even though Horney criticized and quarreled with Kelman in her last years, he continued to be devoted to her ideas. Ultimately, as Horney grew increasingly unhappy with Kelman’s leadership, she enlisted the support of another lieutenant, a Berlin-born psychiatrist named Frederick Weiss, who had joined the AAP in 1943 and quickly demonstrated impressive breadth of learning and intellect. Weiss frequently challenged Kelman in public forums at the AAP. Although the quarreling didn’t really do much to erode Kelman’s power, it created a tense atmosphere at the AAP once again. Marianne Eckardt has noted that her mother had a way of promoting rivalries in the AAP, just as she had between Brigitte and Marianne at home. It is also true that the quarreling and splitting that occurred at the AAP was a re-enactment on a larger scale of the quarreling of young Karen’s parents throughout her childhood. Just as she had never found much peace at home, Karen was never able to create a tranquil, cooperative atmosphere in the organization she founded.”

When disappointed in organizations, including staff looking for independence, Karen had to revert back to herself, much like how she described the neurotic strategies of moving toward people, against people, and then eventually away from people. “Wounded in love and disappointed by the AAP, Horney now turned to pleasures and passions over which she had more control. She continued to supervise candidates and teach at the institute, but she took longer and longer vacations in Mexico and Europe, where she devoted herself with characteristic intensity to her writing (in the morning) and her other pleasures (in the afternoon). Although she continued to have relationships with men, they tended to be of the Peer Gynt type. Her more lasting devotion was to a woman, Gertrude Lederer-Eckardt, who became a constant companion during the last years of her life, and to a cocker spaniel, Butschi, whom she indulged shamelessly and who, it was said, had to like you if you wanted to gain admission to the institute. In this comfortable and safe atmosphere Horney was able to make a brave new departure: to propound a psychological theory that was her own—not a reaction to Freud but an alternative.”