Customer Reviews

Final Lectures

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Karen Horney's work has established it's significance among the counseling profession and practice. This record of her final lectures, offers great insight into both her work and her personality. However, this book is best appreciatted by the experienced counseling student and not the beginner. To the beginner, the lectures will feel like getting the punchline without having heard the body of the joke.

Karen Horney's work is essential reading for anyone suffering from an excess of narcissistic pride. This work, though, is a curiosity for those who are familiar with her groundbreaking work, found to much better effect in NEUROSIS AND HUMAN GROWTH among others. Her final lectures give a certain texture to her as a character, and they are poignant as they come at the end of her life. But without already knowing her work, a general reader is likely to give up halfway here, with a shrug.

I studied at the Horney Institute and even taught there about 15 years ago for a time. I love her outlook on the societal causality of mental illness, but in her major writings, she offers little data on molding the concepts into treatment strategy. This is a record of the very final classes given to her students at the Institute. It is masterfully edited by Douglas Ingram, the former director and former President of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. I admire, both in the book and outside, his careful wording, and thoughtful assessments. I must say that I rather like the Introduction by him better than the lectures per se. I think this book is good for people already familiar with Horney's understanding of the neurotic strivings for self-definition. She was, as is written, a Gentle Rebel, and I think the essence of that comes through more in Ingram than in this tiny slice of Horney.