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PARTISAN REVIEW
It is so much easier for a woman to think that she is nasty to her husband
because, unfortunately, she was born without a penis and envies him
for having one than to think, for instance, that she has developed an
attitude of righteousness and infallibility which makes it impossible to
tolerate any questioning or disagreement. It is so much easier for a
patient to think that nature has given her an unfair deal than to realize
that she actually makes excessive demands on the environment and is
furious whenever they are not complied with.
Horney cannot countenance the Freudian view because it would al–
low "no liking or disliking of people, no sympathy, no generosity, no
feeling of justice, no devotion to a cause, which is not in the last
analysis essentially determined by libidinal or destructive drives."
The aim of therapy is not Freud's modest relief from neurotic
difficulties, but "true happiness," to which most patients, she says,
had never even dared aspire. "The enjoyment of happiness is a
faculty to be acquired from within," she adds, and the end of analysis
for the patient is "to give him the courage to be himself," or in
another formulation, "by rendering a person free from inner bandages
make him free for the development of his best potentialities." Horney
never doubts that when the patient has the courage to be himself
it will be a good self, or that he has best potentialities to develop,
because she shares Rousseau's faith that "the spontaneous individual
self" is born free and good but is everywhere in environmental chains.
Beneath everything there is some sort of ultimate, absolute "genuine–
ness" in the personality, and it is this that gives her her faith, against
Freud's "disbelief in human goodness and human growth," that "man
has the capacity as well as the desires to develop his potentialities
and become a decent human being."
Fromm charges that Freud may have been inspired in his the–
orizing by "an unsolved problem in the relationship to his own
mother," but nothing in Fromm's background has given him cause
to doubt "the unconditioned love of the mother for her children
because they are her children."
The slogan of his "humanistic psycho–
analysis" is "productive love," which enriches both parties and sur–
passeth understanding. Fromm's first book,
Escape from Freedom,
carries as its epigraph the unlovely Talmudic saying
"If
I am not
for myself, who will be for me?" His second book, inevitably entitled
Man for Himself,
explains how he got his key term ("Genuine love
