Customer Reviews

Feminine Psychology (The Norton Library)

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Unfortunately, this is the worst Horney's book, for several reasons. First, This is a compendium of articles and speeches, not a book that has unity, a beginning and end. It was not edited by the author and therefore, it lacks the good flow of thought that her other books have.

Second, these writings are from an earlier phase, when clearly Horney was still very attached and afraid (?) to challenge Freud. I am not going to beat a dead horse here, since there are so many critics of Freud around, but some of his theories sound just like wild guessings to the point of being ridiculous. It feels like Freud has never seen a real child in his life. Horney accepts Freud's psychosexual ideas and swallows them hook and sink: there is no doubt that Horney at that time (1928, 1930) was totally Freudian. Her criticism is just a hint, in two or three very small topics, like penis envy in girls. And even in these topics, she doesn't really challenge her guru and idol Freud.

The later Horney with her brilliant neurosis theory is totally absent from this book. I wonder what her ideas would be had she written a book on the same topic just before her death.

I would recommend this book for everyone specially women to get to know the roots of their psychology. it was Very useful for me.

Karen Horney (1885-1952) was a German psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, who is sometimes classified as "Neo-Freudian," although she questioned/challenged many of Freud's theories (particularly about psychosexual development).

These essays (mostly from her earlier period; many of her ideas matured from the position expressed in some of these essays) were collected and published in 1967 after Horney's death, so they lack the cohesiveness of her books (e.g., Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization, Self-Analysis, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis). There is a helpful introductory essay by editor Harold Kelman.

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Or, to look at it from the point of view of succession in time, that it is wounded womanhood which gives rise to the castration complex, and that it is this complex which injures (not PRIMARILY, however) feminine development."

"Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men. It is inevitable that the man's position of advantage should cause objective validity to be attributed to his subjective, affective relations to the woman, and according to Delius the psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men."

"(W)e may consider how far woman's greater faithfulness might be secondarily considered by the fact that men have enforced the demand for monogamy effectively in every way."

"Male homosexuality has for its basis, in common indeed with all the other perversions, the desire to escape from the female genital, or to deny its very existence."

"The specific satisfactions sought and found in female sex life and motherhod are of a masochistic nature."

in this book karen horney shows her usual insight and clear writing style as she helps to undo some of the damage done by freud's narrow view of the psychology of the female mind