Eminently useful, although somewhat contradictory, this admiring intellectual biography of an iconoclastic psychoanalyst recapitulates the strengths and weaknesses of its subject's thought. Karen Horney (18851952) played a key role in the development of psychoanalysis between the wars and transcended her discipline as a feminist thinker. Horney scholar Paris (English/Univ. of Florida) surveys the psychoanalyst's ideas while locating their sources in her personal experiences. He builds on the work of previous biographers Jack Rubins (Karen Horney, 1978) and Susan Quinn (A Mind of Her Own, not reviewed), who brought messy details of Horney's life to light without, he contends, fully relating them to her mature theory. For Paris, Horney's ideas represent her effort to come to grips with her own problems—to perform, as her best-known title has it, a ``self-analysis.'' After a lucid account of Horney's youth in Germany, Paris treats her early, relatively orthodox essays and her subsequent development of a theory of feminine psychology. He shows how pondering social concerns led Horney to consider the cultural dimensions of neurosis and eventually to develop a new paradigm of psychological structure as a complete, ongoing system, rather than an individual story only understandable through recourse to its occluded origins. Her adult life was thorny: Paris discusses her ``female Don Juanism,'' her battles in the bitter psychoanalytic arena, and her difficult affairs with famed rivals like Erich Fromm. Extensive commentaries on Horney's late thought tie these strands together, focusing on ideas about pride and defense strategies expressed in Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth. Throughout, Paris maintains allegiance to Horney's conviction that we each have a true inner self, even while he depicts stark discontinuities among the facets of her own personality. It will take a grander synthesis than his, one that incorporates wider historical and cultural context, to really resolve this tension between Horney's thought and life. In the interim, however, this serves as a fine introduction to a stimulating thinker whose influence continues to rise as therapy becomes more pragmatic and less dogmatic.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05956-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Two long, very intricate essays: one on the implications of both the inescapability of lying in life and its centrality in psychoanalysis; the other on the nature of money—or, better, of obligation and indebtedness—particularly as seen in Freud's Rat Man case study. Forrester, a science historian (Cambridge Univ.; Dispatches from the Freud Wars, p. 192), is often masterful in the longer and more important piece, his philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration of lying, though at times he writes in a kind of hypercompressed intellectual shorthand. He analyzes first both those philosophers (St. Augustine and Kant, among others) who insist on absolute truthfulness and those (e.g., Nietzsche) who question the equation of the truthful with the moral. Forrester then proceeds to look at the psychoanalytic enterprise, where mental processes, particularly conflicts, are valued over veracity, so that ``psychoanalysis aims to be the science of lying inasmuch as it is the only science that does not find the prospect that the object of its inquiry may intentionally deceive the scientific investigator subversive of its pretensions to truth.'' The second piece is a close but abstruse look at Jacques Lacan's re-reading of the Rat Man case in light of the belief that ``debt . . . becomes something magnificent, the emblem of individual destiny, and the signifier of the social order itself.''Along his somewhat meandering, associative path, Forrester invokes Marcel Mauss's anthropological theory of gifts, Marx on the practical and political role of money in modern society, 19th-century theories of thermodynamics, Karl Polyani's political philosophy, and Keynes's economic theory. Forrester is scintillating for those who can follow him through what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (Terrors and Experts, 1996), in his foreword, calls ``two linked intellectual novellas, a Bildungsroman of ideas.'' But very few readers not well-versed in philosophy, Freud, and Lacan will be able to do so.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-674-53962-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
A mixed bag of 11 pieces, previously unpublished in English, by the noted German-Jewish-American social psychologist. Fromm (The Art of Loving, Escape from Freedom, etc.) is at his most interesting in writing about the complementary nature of the positive ``selfishness'' of a healthy self-love and the capacity to love another, a theme whose expression in modern Western philosophy and in human relationships he explores in the book's longest essay. He also contributes to intellectual history in elaborating on the pioneering proto-feminist 19th-century writings of Swiss legal scholar J.J. Bachofen, who articulated the position, advanced for its time, that while on the whole there are certain basic and deep biological differences between the sexes, characterological differences among individuals are far more significant. Regrettably, these pieces contain some tired perspectives on such issues as homosexuality (in an essay apparently written around 1940, he refers to it as ``usually an expression of grave personality disorder''). Fromm also is not above stating unverifiable psycho-historical points of view. For example, speaking of the capacity to hate as manifest in Weimar and Nazi Germany, he claims, ``Latent hostility was peculiarly the lot of members of [the German lower middle class] long before it was actualized by Nazi propaganda.'' It remains unclear what is, or how one measures or even perceives, such latent hostility. As these essays show, Fromm was a wide-ranging thinker whose writings sometimes manifested brilliant insights or practical wisdom. Yet, as this volume also shows, he will not be remembered as belonging to the first rank of the century's great social scientists and philosophers, especially those from Germany and Austria. That may be because of the diffuseness of Fromm's thought, his often unsatisfying attempts to synthesize the insights of anthropology, philosophy, and history, as well as depth, interpersonal, social, and even his own ``pop'' psychology.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-88064-186-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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