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personal relation, the first break in the patient's chain of "parataxic"
distortions; or, with Horney, simply that human relationship of the
patient's easiest to study, control, and explain to him. "As for the
transference, it is altogether a curse," Freud wrote in a bleak letter
to Pfister in 1910; it never occurred to him that with a little Dracon–
ian redefinition he would have no problem.
If
we take Freud's sexual concepts, so unattractive to Jung's
American contacts in 1912, as basic, there is no likelihood of calling
Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan Freudian psychoanalysts. I would
take these basic concepts to be:
libido,
the volcanic sexual instinct;
id,
the caged beast of the unconscious ("a cauldron of seething ex–
citement," Freud called it in a different metaphor) ; and the
Oedipus
complex,
the destructive rivalry with one parent and attachment to
the other. In varying degrees, the revisionists have denied all three
or modified them out of recognition. For Horney, the libido concept
is harmful nonsense suggesting discouraging limitations to therapy;
the id is a "debatable doctrine" (what she keeps of Freud she calls
"findings," what she rejects, "doctrines") ; and the Oedipus complex
does not exist in healthy adults, but is produced accidentally in neu–
rotics, as Adler had suggested earlier, by parental sex-stimulation or
parent-fostered anxiety. For Fromm, as for Jung, the sexual libido is
simply an assumption "one does not share"; what Freud called id
is largely eradicable drives produced by the culture; and the Oedipus
complex is, Fromm agrees, the central phenomenon of psychology and
the nucleus of all neuroses, but it is not a nasty sexual attraction to
one parent and a murderous rivalry with the other, but merely a
normal and healthy struggle against parental authority in the quest
for freedom and independence. For Sullivan, sexual difficulties tend
to be symptoms rather than causes, so that libido and id simply do
not exist, and a variety of interesting interpersonal attachments take
the place of the Oedipus complex.
The neo-Freudians insist on the importance of sociology and
anthropology for knowledge of the ways in which the culture de–
termines personality and character, or at least limits their possibilities.
A good deal of their sociology, however, seems to be about as pro–
found as Fromm's ingenious formulation "the most backward class,
the lower middle class," and their anthropology is typified by Thomp–
son's statement that Benedict has shown in the Kwakiutl or the Dobu
