Karen Horney and Feminism Author(s): Dee Garrison Source: Signs, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1981), pp.

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Karen Homey and Feminism

Dee Garrison

In 1974 Margaret Mead felt "bored and impatient" with the current feminist protest against Freud's phallocentric beliefs. In his defense she planned to write a statement commending his insight into the universal prevalence of the Oedipus complex and the importance of infantile sexuality. However, when Mead returned to Freud for the first time in thirty years and reread his essays from the perspective of the 1970s, she "experienced a deep shock." It was true that feminists had a case against Freud, Mead acknowledged with newfound dismay: "Freud's ideas on women, far from expressing the early culturally limited phases of the development of one of our most important sciences, are actually an expression, and an extraordinarily naive one, of the still contemporary attitudes about women against which the militants are battling."' Mead's response is a striking example of how a change in the intellectual climate affects the thought of prominent individuals. It is also another reminder that, outside the ranks of feminists, there has been as yet only a limited
1. Margaret Mead, "On Freud's View of Female Psychology," in Womenand Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1975), p. 119.

womenmustmeetwhen EDITORS' NOTE: At least as strong as the opposition theystrugglefor a voice in their own governmentis the struggle theymustface if they dare to describeor analyze themselves.Sharon Sievers gives documentation the for theformer experiencewhen she describes careerof Kishida Toshiko.And if Kishida was forced into silence by political defeat, Karen Homey, who had the aboutwomen,also ceasedafter a timeto write audacityto questionFreud'stheories or speakon that subject-yet not, as Dee Garrisonpoints out, beforeshe had made contributionsthat remain importantto modern feminist theory.
[Signs: Journal of Womenin Culture and Society 1981, vol. 6, no. 4] ? 1981 by The University of Chicago, 0097-9740/81/0604-0004$01.00

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repudiation by the psychoanalytic establishment of the classical Freudian formulation of female development.2 This situation is particularly curious when we consider that clinical evidence, as well as our increased awareness of the effect of socialization upon women, has made it abundantly clear that the old ideas of penis envy, innate submissiveness, female masochism, and the clitoral-vaginal progression should be thoroughly reexamined.3 The inattention becomes more puzzling when we consider the number of articles published in psychoanalytic literature about the most minute shifts in other areas of psychoanalytic theory and even more interesting when we remember that a large percentage of patients have been female. The fact is that despite the muffled protests of a few theorists over the years, "femininity," until recently, was allowed to go its inadequately analyzed way. The most intense analytic debate over the psychology of women took place between 1920 and the mid-1930s. The conflict was of considerable import in psychoanalytic circles of the time and featured Karen Homey as a central adversary.4 In response to Homey's critique of his
2. This is especially true of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Although relatively few in number, there have been, of course, some criticisms of the Freudian analysis of women in major psychoanalytic journals. See, e.g., Mary Jane Sherfey, "The Evolution and Nature of Female Sexuality,"Journal of the AmericanPsychoanalytic Association 14 (January 1966): 28-128; Roy Schafer, "Problems in Freud's Psychology of Women," ibid., 22 (July 1974): 459-85; Robert Seidenberg, "The Sexual Basis of Social Prejudice," PsychoanalyticReview 39 (January 1952): 90-95; and Ruth Moulton, "A Survey and Reevaluation of the Concept of Penis-Envy," Contemporary Psychoanalysis7 (Fall 1970): 84-104. 3. The Freudian view of the development of female psychology may be briefly summarized. Prior to the oedipal phase of childhood, both boy and girl focus eroticism upon the mother. In the oedipal phase, the girl must shift her erotic sensitivity from clitoris to vagina and transfer her libido from mother to father. Unconscious of her vagina but aware that she has no penis, the girl feels the "penis envy" which will shape her psychic development. The discovery that she is "castrated" leads the girl to one of three lines of development. The first leads to sexual inhibition; she renounces clitoral satisfaction, rejects her mother, becomes passive, and represses her sexuality. The second possible reaction is a "masculinity complex," wherein she clings to clitoral masturbation, is nonpassive, and sometimes "regresses" into homosexuality. The third possible avenue of development is the "normal" one. Here the girl turns her libido onto-her father and intensifies her hostility to her mother. Full femininity is achieved when the girl produces a baby, which takes the place of the desired penis. Her happiness is greatest if the baby is a boy who brings the longed-for penis with him. Because the girl's development in the oedipal stage is so different from the boy's, the formation of her superego is incomplete. This explains, for Freud, women's supposedly inferior sense of justice and their tendency toward passive-masochism and subjectivity. In the immense body of literature on Freudianism, I found especially helpful H. F. Ellenberger, The Discoveryof the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1975); Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1959). 4. The importance of this debate has been recognized and briefly discussed in Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysisand Feminism(New York: Random House, 1974); Jean Baker Miller, ed., Psychoanalysisand Women (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973); Helen Block Lewis, Psychic War in Men and Women (New York: New York University Press, 1976); and Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangementsand Human Malaise (New

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theory of female development, Freud was first moved to define his stand more carefully and then was compelled to defend it. Horney's defiance was a courageous act which furthered psychoanalytic theory. Yet it is ironic that feminists have looked to Homey for evidence of the social origins of femininity, in light of Horney's biologically based analysis and her failure to question the political and economic purposes served by male and female sex roles. In our post-Freudian age, it seems selfevident that a theorist's contribution in any area of thought is inevitably shaped by her subjective concerns. An analysis of Horney's limited revisionism is enriched by an understanding of the way in which her personal experience shaped her work and intellectual development. Karen Homey was born in 1885 near Hamburg, Germany, to an aging Norwegian sea captain and a much younger woman of noble German origin. Homey hated and feared her puritanical father. When she was twenty he gave her grudging permission to attend medical school, but only after she had promised him in writing that it would be the last request she would ever make of him. While in school Karen married the young lawyer, Oskar Homey, in 1909. Six years later she received her medical degree from the University of Berlin.5 Her early married years were extremely taxing for, while still a medical student, she gave birth to three daughters. To the overwhelming demands of career, marriage, and family was added the difficulty of functioning as a deviant and ambitious female intellectual. The contradictions in these relationships were insurmountable. Her career prospered; she trained her children toward independence; but her marriage faltered under the strain of overwork and incompatibility. Entering psychoanalysis via the study of neurology, Homey opened her private psychiatric practice in Berlin in 1919. At about this time she became a key figure in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. The Berlin institute, along with the one in Vienna, was one of the two major centers of Freudian thought. Here Homey gained her reputation as one of the foremost training analysts in Europe. She claimed to have been thirty-five years old before she realized,
York: Harper & Row, 1976). Zenia Fliegel, in "Feminine Psychosexual Development in Freudian Theory, a Historical Reconstruction," PsychoanalyticQuarterly 42 (July 1973): 385-409, has given the closest attention to the events. The most informed and sophisticated critique of the Freudian view of women is in Nancy Chodorow, The Reproductionof and the Sociologyof Gender(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Mothering:Psychoanalysis California Press, 1978). 5. I am indebted to Dr. Jack L. Rubins for allowing me to read his biography of Horney while it was still in manuscript form. See Rubins, Karen Homey: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis(New York: Dial Press, 1978), hereafter cited asKaren Horney.Jack L. Rubins, "A Biographical Sketch," in Developmentsin Homey Psychoanalysis,ed. Jack L. Rubins (New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 12-45, also includes a bibliography of ApHorney's work. See also Harold Kelman, Helping People: Karen Horney'sPsychoanalytic proach (New York: Science House, 1971).

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during a conversation with the so-called wild analyst Georg Groddeck in 1920, that "of course men are afraid of women."6 Moving from this "universal proposition," her creative and rebellious qualities led her to question the Freudian theory of female development. Because she was respected as an incisive thinker, a gifted writer, and a noted therapist, Horney and her critique of Freudian theory could not easily be dismissed by the classical theorists. Horney first entered the argument over female psychology in 1922 in her response to Karl Abraham's article, "Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex." Abraham had organized the Berlin institute and was Horney's former analyst. It is clear that he, like Freud and Horney, was concerned with the meaning of the contemporary women's movement and the clinical presence of large numbers of women who were unwilling to accept their prescribed female role. Abraham set out to find a psychological explanation for the wish for sexual equality expressed by so many of his female patients. He quickly dismissed the explanation offered by the women themselves-that they strongly resented the situation under which girls were given less freedom than boys or that "in later life, men are permitted to choose their profession and can extend their sphere of activity in many directions, and especially . . . are subjected to far fewer restrictions in their sexual life." Abraham instead assumed that his patients' conscious arguments were "the result of rationalization" which hid an unresolved unconscious maladjustment that led to the development of a "masculinity complex."7 A woman so allegedly twisted often exhibited two symptoms-a fierce resentment of men and a desire to assume male privileges. Abraham first described women who expressed the "masculinity complex" in nonneurotic ways by learning to cultivate passivity or by denying that there was any significant difference between the treatment of the sexes. In this category Abraham included women whose "homosexuality does not break through to consciousness." These women, "well represented in the women's movement of today," sublimated their wish to be males by following "masculine pursuits of an intellectual and professional character."8 Abraham then described the women patients whose nonresolution of the "castration complex" led them to persist in their desire for a penis. These women expressed their neurotic condition in diverse symptoms: a
The (July 1932): 351n. See also C. Grossmanand G. Grossman,TheWildAnalyst: Life and Work Georg Groddeck (New York:George Braziller,Inc., 1965);and Georg Groddeck,The of Bookof theIt (London: Vision Press, 1950). 7. Karl Abraham, "Manifestations the Female CastrationComplex,"International of 3 Journalof Psycho-Analysis(March 1922): 2. This paper was presented at the Sixth International Psychoanalytic Congress in The Hague, 1920. 8. Ibid., p. 9.
6. Karen Horney, "The Dread of Woman," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 13

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fixed stare (an unconscious symbol of an erection); a red swelling nose (also an attempt to grow a penis); anger at the analyst who insisted that only he could ask questions during treatment; the thrust of an umbrella into the ground (a gesture of phallic energy); "the tendency of neurotic women to give themselves or their relatives enemas"; and "the great enjoyment many women obtain from using the hose for watering the
garden."9

If the lovely Alice-in-Wonderland quality of this essay by the internationally renowned Abraham seems at first humorous, we must remember that this version of innate feminine psychology, which Freud supported,10 has by no means been relegated to the basement of human thought, where it might rest comfortably alongside scholastic arguments about angels dancing on needles or theories regarding the flatness of the earth. Rather Abraham's essay is another example of the heavy toll demanded of those who fit their theory into a patriarchal system of thought. Despite Abraham's and Freud's occasional disclaimers to the contrary, their theories of female development are almost entirely devoid of any real understanding of the cultural determinants of "masculinity" and "femininity," of the socialization toward these roles that shapes children from birth, or of the social purposes, power structures, and economic orders served by these concepts." In 1922 Homey joined Alfred Adler as one of the first psychoanalysts to stress the effect of culture upon psychosexual development.12 At the Seventh International Psychoanalytic Congress, Freud
9. Ibid., p. 5. 10. Sigmund Freud, "FemaleSexuality," TheStandard in Edition theComplete of PsychoFreud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, logical Works Sigmund of 1961), 21:225-43. 11. Freudian theory shows us how a person who has "successfully" resolved the Oedipus complex, superego functions secure, is well adapted to conform to the demands of a particularmoment in history. Men have learned respect for inequalitiesenforced by for death in war.Womenare power, for delayed sexual gratification, the glory of sacrificial freed to play out their role as childbearer,helpmate, nurturer,and keeper of moralitytrained to deny their "masculine" needs as men are taught to deny their "feminine" ones. Abraham'sessay is a good example of how classical psychoanalytical theory has been determined by economic and social conservatism,while, at the same time, it works to shatterthe assumptionson which patriarchy and the ancientmodes of authoritarian social controls are based. Thus, Abrahamcan bring us an insightful clinical descriptionof the crippling effects of sexism on human development,yet he writesin terms thatjustify that oppression. Another orthodox analyst,EdwardGlover, like R. D. Laing later, once noted that "normality may be a form of madnesswhich goes unrecognizedbecauseit happensto be a good adaptationto reality." 12. In 1911 Alfred Adler (1870-1937) withdrewfrom the Freudiancircle in Vienna to develop his own school of psychoanalytic thought. Adler, who analyzedthe establishment and evolution of psychiatryin Marxistterms, taught that the recognition of the suppression of women in a male-dominatedsociety was vitally important to an understanding of the psychologicalstudy of human relations. See Alfred Adler, Understanding HumanNature,trans. WalterB. Wolfe (New York:Allen & Unwin, 1928); ManesSperber,

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chaired the session where Homey presented her reply to Abraham's paper. In her rebuttal, she questioned the unexamined assumption that women felt their bodies were inferior. She suggested that male chauvinism (which she termed "masculine narcissism") was responsible for the assertion that "one-half of the human race is discontented with the sex assigned to it and can overcome this discontent only in favorable circumstances."13 Homey contended that all little girls envied the boy's possession of a penis because the penis was such a wonderful tool for urination, allowing boys urethral eroticism, with fantasies of omnipotence, as well as the freedom of exhibitionism and societally approved onanism. She thus presented two new ideas: that primary penis envy was experienced by all normal girls (just as all normal boys at some time in their development wished to have a baby), and that neurotic penis envy was a secondary development that occurred only when a girl's relationship to her father was distorted by his fearful, seductive, or rejecting behavior toward her. But the chief heresy in Horney's early paper was her argument that male analysts had misunderstood the presence of primary and secondary penis envy in women patients and had seen secondary penis envy as an "axiomatic fact," common to all women, rather than as "a problem in itself."14 In her 1922 paper Homey also hinted at the existence of a pleasure-oriented female sexuality. This idea of a feminine libido is profoundly alien to Freudian thought. In this early essay, however, Homey deferentially bowed to Freud's genius and did not dispute his argument that there was an essential "true nature" for woman that was realized through motherhood and the acceptance of heterosexual love from a father-like male. Indeed, Horney's asides about female development betrayed her essentially traditional attitudes at this point in her life. For example, Homey theorized that the adult woman's attention to bodily display is a regressive reaction to the little girl's inability to display her genitals like a boy when urinating. The greater objectivity of men, on the other hand, was a result of the little boy's ability to find "satisfaction in examination of his own body." Homey thus offered a biologically based explanation of the average woman's attention to beauty and dress and concern with interpersonal activity.15 That Homey could ignore the sociological explanation of these
Masks of Loneliness:Alfred Adler in Perspective (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974); Heinz Ansbucher and Rowena Ansbucher, eds., The Individual Psychologyof Alfred Adler: A SystematicPresentation in Selectionsfrom His Writings (New York: Basic Books, 1956); and Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler (New York: Vanguard Press, 1957). 13. Karen Homey, "On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis5 (January 1924): 51. 14. Ibid., p. 50. 15. Ibid., p. 53.

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female characteristics is significant. When she wrote this essay there had existed for almost fifty years, especially in the United States, England, and Germany, a well-known and extensive body of literature of feminist protest against the socioeconomic conditions that caused women to concentrate upon their physical beauty and to deny themselves "objective" pursuits. Certainly Homey must have been aware of the intense controversy concerning the "woman problem," as it was called.16 Homey, at this period in her career, overlooked the cultural interpretation of female behavior and was intent upon amplification, but not rejection, of the Freudian model. Horney's personal problems probably contributed to her avoidance of a sharp break with Freud at this time. In 1922 her brother's death plunged her into an acute depression.17 In 1924 her husband's illness caused him to become morose and withdrawn. The next year his heavy business speculations ended in bankruptcy. In addition to her personal difficulties, her reticence was no doubt compounded by her pronounced distaste for active conflict with others, a trait which vied with her equally strong drive toward leadership. In 1924 Freud, who had repeatedly stated that the psychology of women was extraordinarily obscure to him, suddenly put forward a theory of femininity, despite his frank admission that he had little clinical evidence to support his hypothesis. In his essay Freud postulated that the girl's discovery of her inferior body led her to reject her mother and to "share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect." Femininity was developed via penis envy and the girl's recognition of her castration.18 Freud based much of his 1924 essay upon the now discredited view of the differentiated progression from clitoral to vaginal sensitivity in the "normally" developed female.19 He did not recognize the persistence of clitoral dominance and attempted to explain the "shift" from clitoral centered sexuality to vaginal sensitivity by the girl's humiliating discovery of her unsatisfactory genital organ. "Masturbation, at all events of the clitoris," was proclaimed by Freud to be "masculine activity" and the elimination of clitoral sexuality was the "necessary precondition for the development of femininity."2" In orthodox Freudian theory, the clitoris can never compete with the phallus as a symbol. The achievement of
16. Homey lectured on "The Role of Women in Society" at the Humboldt Hochschule in 1927. Most of the audience were members of the Jugendbewegung, a youth movement, and regarded Horney as an example of the emancipated woman. 17. She became suicidal at this time (Rubins, Karen Homey, p. 87). 18. Sigmund Freud, "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes," in Strachey, trans. and ed., 19:253. 19. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1966). 20. Freud, "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes," p. 255.

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oedipal attraction to her father became a girl's first triumph in her march to the feminine destiny. Homey claimed to have "pulled her punches"21 in her 1926 reply to Freud's paper. Yet for the first time she was openly critical of analytic males and of Freud in particular. Perhaps this was a result of her discovery of the work of Georg Simmel, who awakened her to the notion that in a male-dominated world, "the State, the laws, morality, religion and the sciences" all reflected male needs.22 Perhaps her new militancy was a response to her separation from her husband in 1926, after a long period of economic distress and mutual unhappiness. Homey pointed out in her answer to Freud that the culture in which psychoanalysis had developed gave Freudian theory a masculine bias. Freud's view of women was merely a male fantasy, she argued, and differed not "a hair's breadth from the typical ideas which the [little] boy has of the [little] girl."23 Homey also touched upon an idea which she would develop later-that the male "dogma of the inferiority of women" had its origins in the unconscious fear of men that they might be reabsorbed into the vagina. Homey also sketched in her essay the lusty sexual insatiability of women, the pleasurable aspect of clitoral stimulation, the early discovery of the vagina by the little girl, the little boy's envy of motherhood and the social disadvantage of being female which led many women to a "flight from womanhood": Historically the relation of the sexes may be crudely described as that of master and slave.... Here we probably have the explanation also of the underestimation of this factor in analytical literature. In actual fact a girl is exposed from birth onward to the suggestion ... of her inferiority, an experience which must constantly stimulate her masculinity complex. There is one further consideration. Owing to the hitherto purely masculine character of our civilization ... it seems to me impossible to judge to how great a degree the unconscious motives for the flight from womanhood are reinforced by the actual social insubordination of women.24 At the 1927 International Congress of Psycho-Analysis in Innsbruck, Homey was joined by two powerful allies in her disagreement with Freud. Ernest Jones, the superb publicist of Freudian psychology, noted the "unhealthy suspicion growing that men analysts have been led
21. Karen Homey to Georg Groddeck, reprinted in Rubins, Karen Homey, p. 112. 22. Karen Horney, "The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and Women," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis7 (JulyOctober 1927): 325. Also see Lewis A. Coser, "Georg Simmel's Neglected Contributions to the Sociology of Women," Signs: Journal of Womenin Culture and Society 2, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 869-76. 23. Horney, "The Flight from Womanhood," p. 327. 24. Ibid., p. 338.

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to adopt an unduly phallo-centric view." Citing Homey repeatedly, he agreed that femininity was a primary, not a secondary, development and that vaginal awareness came very early to the little girl. At the same conference, Melanie Klein, whose work stressed the importance of the pre-oedipal relationship with the mother, argued that the male's frustrated wish to bear a child led him to overestimate the value of the penis and to feel contempt for women's "inferior body."25 At the time of the Innsbruck conference, Horney was one of the most respected women analysts in the world. She was a mature forty-two years of age, sexually active, and solely responsible for the care of three teenage daughters. In 1927 she demonstrated a new confidence and sense of self in her break with Freud over the question of lay analysis.26 At this time she also rebelliously lent support to an eclectic group of psychotherapists which was censured by the German Psychoanalytic Association.27 Until the Innsbruck meeting, Horney's papers on feminine psychology expressed the doubt she felt as a woman in the theoretical structure of her male-dominated profession. But during the years between 1927 and 1932 she shifted her attention to an analysis of marital conflict, a concern which surely reflected her own marriage problems. What, she asked, "in spite of constant matrimonial unhappiness in all ages, continues to impel human beings into marriage?" It is not a natural desire for mate and children that drives people into marriage, she argued, but rather the expectation that one could find in monogamous marriage the fulfillment of old desires arising out of the Oedipus situation in childhood. Thus, the monogamous ideal was doomed for two reasons: the hostilities aroused in each partner by the inevitable disappointment of infantile wishes and the threat posed to each superego by the incest taboo.28 In her complex analysis of the distrust between the sexes, rooted in childhood wishes and fears, Horney deromanticized the Victorian notion of the marital bond. She maintained that the monogamous demand "represents the fulfillment of narcissistic and sadistic impulses far more than it indicates the wishes of genuine love."29 In her writings on mar25. Ernest Jones, "The Early Development of Female Sexuality," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 8 (October 1927): 459; Melanie Klein, "Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict," ibid., 9 (April 1928): 167-80. 26. Karen Horney, "Discussions on Lay Analysis," International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 8 (April 1927): 255-59. 27. Rubins, "A Biographical Sketch" (n. 5 above), p. 22. 28. Karen Horney, "Problems of Marriage," reprinted in translation in Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold Kelman (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), pp. 119-32. 29. Karen Horney, "The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (July 1928): 328. This paper was read at the Tenth International Psychoanalytic Congress, Innsbruck, September 3, 1927. See also Karen Horney, "The Problem of the Monogamic Statute," PsychoanalyticReview 15 (January 1928): 92-93.

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riage, Homey included a cultural analysis of the way in which males enforced their demand for monogamy, through the economic dependence imposed upon women and the "draconic punishments" exacted for feminine unfaithfulness. Her explanation of sexual conflict and female psychology was a curious mutation in which she crossed Freudian-like biological determinism with her own recognition of sociological causation. Meanwhile, in 1929 and 1930, the debate over feminine development erupted again when Helene Deutsch and Otto Fenichel entered the row. Like the other analysts, Deutsch distorted her concept of feminine development by her persistent attempt to explain in theory the clitoral-vaginal progression which we now know does not exist. After renunciation of clitoral sensation, Deutsch argued, the female turned her libido into a wish for a child and was "deflected in a regressive direction toward masochism." This acceptance of passive-masochism became, for Deutsch, the "necessary condition for vaginal sensation" experienced by the mature woman.30 Deutsch hated her mother and her sister and was encouraged by her beloved father to reach for autonomy. She was shaped by an experience vastly different from Karen Horney's, whose father was a repressive patriarch and whose dynamic mother encouraged her to go into medicine. At any rate, Deutsch's assumptions were distinctly antifemale. She believed that clitoral pleasure should be renounced and that a woman's acceptance of masochistic impulses, rather than being seen as a neurotic trait, was the goal which a good therapist would help his female patient to reach. Freud often seemed to question his hypothesis of sexual polarities, even in his last papers. Not so Deutsch. She was committed to the view that women did not have the same human needs for activity outside the family that she assumed men to have.31 Although Otto Fenichel agreed with Homey and Jones on several minor points, his main contribution to the debate was to strengthen the Freudian theory of female psychology. And it was Fenichel who attributed to Jones Homey's idea of a distinction between "normal" and "neurotic" penis envy.32 Homey was angered by the analytic reaction in 1929 and 1930 to her theory of female development. Her daughter reported that it was about this time that the large picture of Freud that had hung in Karen's home was removed from the wall. From this point on, Homey was an
30. Helene Deutsch, "The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 11 (January 1930): 48-60. Deutsch presented this paper at the Eleventh International Psychoanalytic Congress, Oxford, England, July 27, 1929. 31. Helene Deutsch, Confrontationswith Myself:An Epilogue (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), and The Psychologyof Women, 2 vols. (New York: Bantam Books, 1973). 32. Otto Fenichel, "The Pregenital Antecedents of the Oedipus Complex," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 12 (April 1931): 141-66, and "Specific Forms of the Oedipus Complex," ibid., 12 (April 1931): 412-30.

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outspoken opponent of orthodox Freudianism. In November 1930 she gave a spirited speech to the German Women's Medical Association in which she discussed male envy of women's ability to give birth.33 In 1931 Homey dismissed Freud's hypothesis of a death instinct. Human aggression was not innate, she argued, but was produced by individual anxiety. This anxiety, she said, was fostered by a faulty social and economic structure that oppressed the masses and by a patriarchal culture that derogated the females who shaped the children of the world.34 Freud did not respond to the Horney-Jones-Klein arguments until 1931. He then focused his attention on the supposed transition from clitoral to vaginal sensuality. Restating his earlier decision regarding the development of the "creature who is without a penis," he found Abraham's 1920 description of the castration complex in women "still unsurpassed" and praised Deutsch's defense of innate female masochism. Freud briefly stated that Horney's dissent did "not tally" with his own observations and disposed of Jones with a curt comment that the Jones formulation did not "correspond either to the dynamic or the chronological position of things."35 Freud's reaction influenced Horney's decision to move to the United States in 1932. She was disillusioned with the sectarian nature of the psychoanalytic circle in Germany, where deviation from the orthodox model would not easily be tolerated. A shift to the United States offered adventure and perhaps a chance for independent thinking and teaching. In America there was the possibility for an academic medical appointment, a position she could not hope to achieve in Germany. The political situation in Germany was probably a lesser influence upon her decision to relocate. Although an anti-Fascist, Homey was essentially apolitical. Throughout her life she displayed a remarkable unconcern toward politics, especially evidenced in her naive attitude toward the threatening developments in Germany in the early 1930s. Still, the Nazis considered Freudianism to be a Jewish innovation, and even though she was not Jewish, she surely sensed that there was some reason to fear connection with psychoanalysis. One of the first prominent European analysts to arrive in the United States, she became associate director of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, newly organized by Franz Alexander. There she worked as a training analyst and taught courses in psychoanalytic theory and feminine psychology. She was initially repulsed by the easy familiarity and materialism she encountered in the United States. At first her finan33. Karen Horney, "The Distrust between the Sexes," reprinted in translation in Kelman, ed., 107-8. 34. Karen Homey, "Culture and Aggression," AmericanJournal of Psychoanalysis20 (November 1960): 130-38. 35. Freud, "Female Sexuality," pp. 225-43.

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cial situation was precarious. A forty-seven-year-old woman alone in an alien culture, she was also burdened with learning English and preparing for her state board exams while caring for two adolescent daughters.36 Yet, despite the difficulties of transition, Homey quickly adjusted to her new environment. She especially relished the pragmatic reception given to her deviant views in the United States. Her belief in the importance of cultural factors in personality formation was strengthened by her exposure to a different society. Before long she was socially active again, counting among her new friends Karl Menninger and Harold Lasswell. Unlike many immigrant analysts, Homey never spoke of feeling uprooted. Margaret Mead recalled that in 1932 Homey "looked like a 'typical' Viennese intellectual" who judiciously neglected her personal appearance. But when Mead met her again six years later in New York, Horney sported a fashionable hat and dress and seemed thoroughly Americanized.37 The migration to the United States in the 1930s of European analysts fleeing the Nazis strengthened the popularity of Freudian analysis in America, where it prospered as it never did in Europe.38 Despite the acclaim accorded to Freud, however, he feared the vulgarization of orthodox theory in what he believed to be an inferior culture. He was disdainful of much about American life, but he especially disliked the American ideal of political equality between the sexes. He referred to "petticoat government" in the United States and once said that "American men don't know how to make love. . . . There must be inequality and the superiority of the male is the lesser of two evils."39 Freud also recognized that arrival in the United States seemed to foster rebellion among some of his followers. He believed that all the major analytic dissenters-Alfred Adler, CarlJung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and Horney-had been corrupted by their exposure to American society. In the same year she moved to Chicago, Horney dropped her next bombshell, "The Dread of Woman," upon the battlefield. Here she explored the ways in which men objectified their horror of being reabsorbed into the vagina. She found it amazing that the "never ending conflict between the man's longing for the woman and his dread of her"
36. Two daughters came to Chicago, while one remained in Germany. See Marianne Horney Eckhardt, "Organizational Schisms in American Psychoanalysis" (paper delivered at the History Seminar, Payne Whitney Clinic, New York City, Fall 1976). 37. Rubins, Karen Homey, pp. 167-68. 38. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans:The Beginnings of Psychoanalysisin the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); John Burnham, "Psychoanalysis in American Medicine, 1894-1918: Medicine, Science and Culture," PsychologicalIssues 5, no. 4, monograph 20 (1966-67): 1-240. 39. Roazen (n. 3 above), p. 385.

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had been given so little attention by analysts despite the "overwhelming mass of this transparent material."40 She restated her belief that only neurotic women experienced penis envy and that male fear of coitus explained one of the reasons why male analysts had interpreted the female "castration complex" as they had. Men's disparagement of women, she said, allayed male anxiety and helped to support masculine self-respect: "I think it probable that the masculine dread of the woman (the mother) or of the female genital is more deep-seated, weighs more heavily and is usually more energetically repressed than the dread of the man (father), and that the endeavor to find the penis in women represents first and foremost a convulsive attempt to deny the existence of the sinister female genital."41 She again denied Freud's notion that the vagina remained undiscovered by the little girl and refuted Deutsch's view of inborn female masochism. If either a male or a female patient experienced sexual impulses as sadistic, Homey said, it was because the patient was "markedly neurotic."42 This 1932 essay is a strong, even bitter and vicious, attack which set Freudian theory on its ear. Homey asserted that the male's castration anxiety was shaped by his dread-desire not to be a woman, rather than by his fear of loss of the penis. Whereas males were forced to prove their manhood through an erection, women were able merely to be, and not to do, "a fact which has always filled men with admiration and resentment."43 In Homey's new statement of theory, it was the man, not the woman, who suffered a psychic wound from which he could not recover and who felt anxiety over his physical inferiority. As a means of compensation the male then demeaned the female sex as a whole, deciding that women were not his equal in the sexual, ethical, or intellectual sphere. Horney's malicious description of the development of masculinity, which she stated to be ordained by anatomy, was surely as angering to many male readers as the Freudian-Deutsch assignment of female frailties was to some female readers. Again, Horliey demonstrated her reliance upon biological factors in her analysis of the development of sex roles. The analytic dispute continued between 1932 and 1933. Ernest Jones, in another attempt to reconcile the warring factions, investigated the "unmistakeable disharmony" among various writers on female sexuality. Jones never recanted his differences with Freud but merely submerged them.44 In Horney's last papers on female psychology, presented in 1933, she once more attacked the orthodox view of penis envy and female masochism. She cautioned that the precise weight of biologi40. Homey, "The Dread of Woman" (n. 6 above), p. 350. 41. Ibid., p. 352. 42. Ibid., p. 357. 43. Ibid., p. 359. 44. Ernest Jones, "Early Female Sexuality," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis16 (July 1935): 263-73.

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cal and cultural factors on female development could not accurately be assessed until "we have the results of anthropological investigations using valid psychoanalytical criteria in several culture-areas significantly different from ours."45 Although Freud produced one more paper on femininity in 1933,46 the debate with Homey effectively ended with a Freudian victory in 1931. The importance of Freud's triumph does not lie in the ferocity of the conflict. The historical interest of the debate rather lies in the way in which the important issues raised were all but ignored by later theorists who accepted Freud's defense of his admittedly unsupported hypothesis-which he continually warned was not backed by sufficient clinical evidence. Even in his last words on feminine psychology, Freud reminded his disciples that femininity remained little understood. Still, we must remember that Freud stooped to an absurd tautology when he accused Homey in 1938 of suffering from an unconscious resistance to his superior wisdom. Apparently not being able to produce any satisfactory logical refutation of her points, he fell back on an empty claim: "We shall not be very surprised if a woman analyst who has not been sufficiently convinced of her own desire for a penis also fails to assign an adequate importance to that factor in her patients."47 Homey decided to leave Chicago in 1934 partly because Alexander objected to her vocal "revolutionary approach which implied the repudiation of so many of Freud's fundamental concepts."48 She moved to New York City where her private practice quickly expanded. There she taught at the New School; became friends with Ruth Benedict, Clara Thompson, and Harry Stack Sullivan; and reestablished contact with others like Paul Tillich, Eric Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich. Due to the influx of refugee analysts from Europe, many of them devoted students or colleagues of Freud, the New York Psychoanalytic Society, to which Homey was admitted, was becoming increasingly authoritarian, insistent on doctrinal purity among its members.49 The orthodox analysts were disturbed by her publications of 1936 and 1937
45. Karen Homey, "The Problem of Female Masochism," PsychoanalyticReview 22 (July 1935): 257. This paper was presented in 1933. Also, Karen Horney, "Denial of the Vagina," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis14 (January 1933): 57-70. 46. Freud, "Femininity," in Strachey, trans. and ed., 22:112-35. 47. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1949), p. 107. Of course Homey, too, was guilty of this type of circular reasoning in her critique of Freudian theory. Too often excluding the presentation of logic and evidence, psychoanalytic theorists of all stripes have been prone to blame their opponent's unconscious as the real source of opposing ideas. 48. Cited in Rubins, ed., Developmentsin Homey Psychoanalysis(n. 5 above), p. 24. 49. Homey was later to charge that the society had "become a hotbed of political intrigue; a religious fervor has replaced free inquiry, and dogma has firmly established itself under the guise of science" (cited in Eckhardt, p. 7). See also Abraham Kardiner's tape in the Oral History Collection, "The Psychoanalytic Movement," at Columbia University Library, New York City.

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that argued the influence of culture upon psychic development.50 Horney was troubled by this reaction to her work. Direct conflict with others was exceedingly unpleasant to her. In New York, she once wept publicly during a vociferous discussion of her ideas. Throughout her life Homey alternated between a passive and self-effacing attitude and a more outspoken and assertive one. While longing for congenial relations with her analytic colleagues, she was also driven by a desire to develop her own theory, despite opposition from others. In 1939 her second book threw overboard many accepted principles of Freudianism and created a storm of protest.51 During 1940 the discussion of her views grew more heated; she recalled one shouting match between herself and another female analyst over the issue of penis envy versus social injustice. Finally, in April 1941, Homey was disqualified as a training analyst by the New York group. In a memorable scene, she and four colleagues arose and walked out of the meeting in dramatic silence. Clara Thompson, one of the dissidents, described their progression down the New York streets, as they sang in jubilation the old spiritual "Go Down Moses, Let My People Go."52 The last ten years of Horney's life were marred for her by the defection of two groups of her followers;53 yet she continued to invest an enormous amount of energy in creative activity. Fame and wealth came from the sale of her six books. After she published her last book in 1950 she complained of feeling isolated and lonely. Although she was often surrounded by admiring friends, Homey was an unusually private person. She maintained many intimate relationships with men, but never chose to remarry. Near the end of her life, she became preoccupied with religious questioning and developed an interest in Zen Buddhism. Horney became ill in November 1952 and died of cancer within two weeks at the age of sixty-seven. One of the last persons to talk with her was Robert Coles, who was then a young intern in the hospital where she died. While he administered medicine to her, she questioned him closely about the number of female students in his medical school.54 In its final, most mature development, Horney's psychoanalytic theory was neo-Freudian in its reliance upon several basic concepts. Homey agreed with Freud on various major issues-the doctrine of
50. Karen Homey, "Culture and Neurosis," American Sociological Review 1 (April 1936): 221-30; and The Neurotic Personalityof Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1937). 51. Karen Homey, New Waysin Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939). 52. See Clara Thompson's unpublished paper, "The History of the William Alanson Institute" (available from the author); and Kardiner. 53. See Eckhardt; and an unpublished paper by Ralph M. Crowley and Maurice R. Green, "Revolution within Psychoanalysis, a History of the William Alanson White Institute" (available from the authors). 54. Robert Coles, "Karen Horney's Flight from Orthodoxy," in Strouse, ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 216-21.

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unconscious motivation, the hypothesis that psychic processes were strictly determined, and the assumption that attitudes and behaviors were motivated by external forces. She also praised Freud's use of the concepts of transference, resistance, and free association as therapeutic tools. But her disagreements with Freud were profound. Most basic was her rejection of his mechanistic tendency to explain psychic phenomena as the result of instinctual and unchanging forces. Homey was critical of Freud's way of seeing "trends prevailing in the middle-class neurotic of Western civilization" as traits which were "inherent in 'human nature.' "55 She taught that neurosis was produced not by conflict between id, ego, and superego but by conflict between the individual and the environment. She regarded the libido theory as unproved, refuted the idea of repetition-compulsion, and denied the universal validity of any developmental stage, including the Oedipus complex. Nothing was universal in Horney's final view. Everything depended upon the interaction of culture and personality. Her most developed and influential contribution to psychoanalytic theory came after 1933 and chiefly concerned, not women, but her concept of basic anxiety and its relationship to the neurotic character structure. Although much of her work has been integrated into modern psychoanalytic theory, Homey is usually not given sufficient recognition as an innovative theorist. The early transformation of Freudianism from a pioneering discovery into a dogmatic gospel as well as the strong personal animosity directed at Homey by members of the orthodox school have tended to obscure the value of her work and to distort its content. Nevertheless, much modern scholarship recognizes her importance as a bridge builder to ego psychology, as an early defender of the importance of culture in determining personality, and as a leader in the development of techniques aimed at therapies of shorter duration and directed toward symptomatic improvement. Horney's holistic description of human development was very close to Alfred Adler's sociological orientation and his interest in ego psychology.56 Like Adler, she had an optimistic view of human potential and capacity for change. If neurosis was the result of a faulty environment, then communal feeling and socially useful behavior could be promoted by convincing people that these served their best interests. Unlike Adler, however, her views were not informed by a Marxist perspective. Homey had no mature political commitment of any sort, other than to a vague, generalized belief in individual rights.57 Paul Goodman accused her of
55. Homey, New Ways in Psychoanalysis,p. 168. 56. See Nathan Freeman, "Concepts of Adler and Horney," American Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (May 1950): 18-26. 57. Karen Horney, "Can You Take a Stand?" Journal of Adult Education 11 (April 1939): 129-32.

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teaching a psychology of nonrevolutionary social adjustment, an "ideal of the industrial status quo" from which all "revolutionary dynamics to bring about change has vanished."58 Horney's disinterested acceptance of political and economic realities goes far to explain why she stopped short at a crucial point in her analysis of female psychology. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Homey remarked that the chief reason for her initial break with Freudianism was its fallacious description of the female. In consideration of her early and intense interest in feminine psychology, why did she abruptly cease to address the subject in 1933? Several reasons may be surmised. Perhaps she was simply bored with the topic. She was forty-eight years old in 1933 and had centered her attention upon the subject for eleven years. Probably more important was her reaction to her expulsion from the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. Franz Alexander accused her of merely tearing down Freudian theory without putting anything in its place. His protest was largely justified, especially as it applied to her writings about women. She may have taken his criticism to heart, shifting her theoretical analysis to a wider study of neurotic tendencies in general.59 Another reason she backed away from the conflict over the meaning of femininity certainly was her distaste for personal confrontation. Her striking lack of political awareness left her without the intellectual mechanisms to enable her to understand why people could be so hostile toward her over questions of "mere" theory. It is also possible that financial considerations influenced her decision. Like all analysts, she was dependent to a large degree upon professional referrals and alignment with psychoanalytic organizations. In the early 1930s the further development of a feminist critique might have threatened her financial security. But perhaps the best explanation of Horney's decision to put aside the question of women's personality development is the existence of the cultural barriers that impeded her intellectual growth as a feminist. There was no contemporary women's movement that helped her to articulate the collective political aspects of women's rights. Like the majority of achieving professional women in the United States between 1920 and 1960, her concept of accomplishment and autonomy for women was shaped to fit the stereotypical design for masculine success. Her post-1933 writings counseled women to achieve only as individuals, whether that be through work or marriage or a combination of the two. Homey clearly saw the oppression of women as a group, but her individualistic solution to their plight was not dependent upon significant social change. In this, her thought was typical of many in the two "lost"
58. Paul Goodman, "The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud," Politics 2 (July 1945): 202. 59. See esp. Karen Homey, Self-Analysis(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1942); Our Inner Conflicts (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1954); and Neurosis and Human Growth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950).

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generations of feminists who came to intellectual maturity between the suffrage victory and the current feminist movement. Elaine Showalter has written of how these "modern women" were different from the feminist generations that preceded and followed them. The older feminist group, born near the middle of the nineteenth century, recognized that, for them, marriage and work were mutually exclusive and accepted the necessity to choose between the two. These older feminists, suffragists, and professionals had fought for the right of women to "free" themselves from domesticity and motherhood in order to become active in a career or in social reform movements. Liberation for the earlier group had also included the denial of a female sexual appetite. Their sexual inhibitions became a source of strength drawn from their supposed spiritual superiority over men and their intense emotional bonding with other women. By contrast, post-1920 feminists, of whom Homey is representative, insisted upon the right to selffulfillment in both public and family life. They did not want to purchase independence at the price of celibacy and childlessness. They painfully overcame the puritanism of their childhood and freely acknowledged their sexual needs. In the process, although they gained much, they lost the older reliance upon a support system of homosocial relationships and female bonding. They also tended to blame themselves for their general failure to successfully combine love and work rather than challenging the basic assumptions of a patriarchal society. Their struggles and disappointed expectations set the basis for contemporary feminism. Like the lost generations, today's feminists demand their right to public and family life, but, unlike the preceding group, they have returned to the feminist tradition of female unity while emphasizing a new analysis of patriarchal society-a theory which stresses that role conflict is a political and economic problem, not just a personal one.60 Thus, Horney's thought both illustrates feminist history and provides a new perspective on it. The group of feminists she typifies sought heterosexual love as well as work, yet lacked today's theoretical understanding of why they had such difficulty in combining career, marriage, and motherhood. Between 1920 and 1960 most feminists thought there were no more major structural changes in American society to be won. They believed that progress for women could now be measured in individual terms and won by individual effort. Moreover, Horney's work on women is founded on two questionable assumptions: a belief that attraction between the sexes is explained by a primary innate heterosexuality arising spontaneously in both men and women, and a belief that women have an innate wish for motherhood.61 Here Horney relies, like Freud, on a form of biological determinism. Thus, despite her importance as a
60. Elaine Showalter, ed., "Introduction," These Modern Women (Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978), pp. 3-31. 61. Chodorow (n. 4 above).

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psychoanalytic theorist and as a transitional figure in feminist theory, her contribution to the self-understanding of women was seriously limited. In the interwar conflict over femininity, real differences were aired, but the flurry ended with the Freudian view of women still dominant. The interval of disagreement coincided with Freud's debilitating illness. This both hampered his own thinking and increased the desire of his followers to protect him from dissent. In addition, the Freudian movement was shaken at this time by the defections of Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, and Wilhelm Reich. In light of the earlier schisms created by Alfred Adler and CarlJung, Freud possibly feared a Homey faction and moved to discount it. All these internal factors combined with external the threat of war, and the decline of feminism-to ones-depression, dampen the conflict over female psychology in the late 1930s. After the expulsion or withdrawal of the heretics, the issue of femininity fell back into comfortable nonresolution for the next twenty-five years. Although Clara Thompson wrote about the cultural determinants of female experience in the 1940s,62 it was not until the revival of feminism in the 1960s that the subject of women reappeared as a topic for debate in the standard analytic literature. Thus there remains a central question to be considered. Why was the Freudian interpretation of feminine psychology so long unexamined by the psychoanalytic center? This can be partially explained by a recognition of how an analysis of female sex role conditioning inevitably expands to a consciousness of how the male sex role also is shaped to allow the male to play out his economic, social, and political part within the established order. Once begun, a discussion of the purpose and function of sex roles easily leads to a radical social critique. Seen in this way, the psychoanalysts' reluctance to pursue the matter becomes more understandable. The psychoanalytic establishment is dependent upon peaceful coexistence within the political and economic system. Despite the moderate political position that most analysts hold, to expect a radical world view from them is not consistent with the historical realities of the development of professions. In conclusion, it is interesting to note that one of the most prom-, inent themes in Horney's work after 1940 is her repeated reference to the type of "neurotic structure" that is marked by "neurotic pride" and "a search for glory." Again and again she returns to a negative description of this idealized self-image-a virtuous, strong "super-personality" that feels capable of independent and autonomous life. Without denying the validity of her caution against grandiosity, still one wonders if Hor62. See Ruth Moulton, "The Role of Clara Thompson in the Psychoanalytic Study of Women," in Strouse, ed., pp. 319-29.

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ney does not finally protest too much in her frequent warnings to her readers that they must guard against the presence of such an illusion in themselves. Perhaps she is also expressing her own feminine experience, as she was forced to inhibit her analytical ability and sense of self during her long battle to win acceptance for herself and for her work. Departmentof History Rutgers University