Freudian Nostalgia

Parent symbolism make it easy to guess at their hidden leaning. What else could be the meaning of the fear of burglars, snakes, wild animals, and thunderstorms , if not the feminine fear of overwhelming forces that can vanquish, penetrate and destroy?' What else indeed??if, that is, you think along Freudian lines. If, however, you don't, it is readily apparent that burglars, snakes, wild animals and thunderstorms could mean different things in different cultures, and that in any case such fears are shared by little boys too. The above quotation represents Horney the Freudian. At other points in Feminine Psychology* she appears as a left-wing deviationist and even, at times, as a frank subvertor (she eventually 'eft the established fold) but her basic vocabulary and assumptions remain those of the old mandarin himself. The papers contained in this book date from the late 'twenties and early 'thirties, the period when she was a lecturer at the orthodox Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute before leaving for America. They are thus of historical rather than immediate interest, and they do n?t, in sum, make for particularly satisfying or inspiring reading. In spite of many sympathetic passages , one's strongest overall impression is of a ^oman chronically divided between what she had keen educated to think and what she perceived, conducting a laborious, piecemeal and in many ways disguised , one-woman stand against the more extreme rigidities and excesses of by-the-book Freudianism. It is, of course, too easy now for the layman (or, Perhaps more, the laywoman) to point out the errors and over-interpretations to which the middle-class, nineteenth-century, Jewish Viennese was prone, and the reason it is easy is partly because people like Dr. Horney have paved the way for us. While Karen Horney could only hint that perhaps cultural factors should be taken into account as well as instinctual ones, and that she, personally, couldn't help feeling that by penis envy one must mean something wider than a positive desire for a penis?we can weigh in with a confident: 'But good Lord, of course Freud's insight was limited by the time he lived in But I say, good heavens, you don't really mean there are still people who take all that stuff about the feminine castration complex absolutely seriously? ... Go on!' Reading these papers in the 1960s is unfair; empirical psychology has moved on, even if not all analysts have. Today, particularly …