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PARTISAN REVIEW
1982), and by others who focused on how social norms manage to in–
vade every girl's unconscious . Westkott then outlines how Horney's
instinct theory differed from Freud's and how she increasingly em–
phasized the importance of culture just at the time when American
Freudians embraced and elaborated ego psychology. Surely, their
explorations of the roots of neurosis and their psychology of women
were bound to be at loggerheads.
Westkott demonstrates that Horney changed her views when
her patients were not being cured effectively , but ignores the fact
that by then all analysts were groping for better techniques for
handling the phenomenon of transference. Horney's
forte ,
of course,
was her social criticism, both in
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
(1937) and in
New Ways in Psychoanalysis
(1939) . That was why she
rejected penis envy once again - as yet another means of explaining
women's anger at husbands who wanted to keep them "obedient and
infantilized." Horney locates parents, and particularly mothers, be–
tween culture and psyche . Cultural conditions , she asserted , deter–
mine neuroses - which in turn originate in the infant's wish for
safety and for satisfaction: favorable conditions allow for the devel–
opment of inner security and freedom . Fear and hostility suffered at
the hand of devaluing and uncaring parents cause their daughters
(narcissistic and masochistic) neurotic conflicts . Horney emphasizes
how in Western culture females were pushed into dependency and
submissiveness - which then encourage compliant affection and
repressed hostility . Thereby , the sexualization of girls (rather than
incest alone) creates an "emotional hothouse" that tends to culminate
in the "feminine type" - afraid of sexual exploitation by "compulsive
masculinity." Sexual seductiveness becomes a strategy for finding
safety, but it is accompanied by feelings of devaluation and degrada–
tion which, in turn, reaffirm that women are nothing but sex objects .
Ultimately, Westkott advocates Horney's credo of self-responsibility
in overcoming compulsive femininity, female altruism, and
dependency, and she champions the heroine who believes that she
herself is "worthy of care and that the world is her domain." These
goals, I might add, also "desexualize" Horney's brand of psycho–
analysis and coincide with the goals of the Freudians she refutes:
they too believe that feelings have to be worked through emotionally
in order to arrive at true self-knowledge .
Grosskurth's
Melanie Klein
is a psychoanalytic biography, based
on Klein's papers, works, previous biographies, and interviews with
family members and coworkers . Klein's doctrines involved all sorts
