The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney

By Marcia Westkott

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300037066
• ISBN13: 9780300037067
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating but not flawless

This is a great (but not flawless) book. In it, Marcia Westkott boldly argues that the psychoanalyst Karen Horney's mature theory is not gender neutral - as Horney herself intended - but is instead based on feminine psychology. `My approach is,' states Westkott, `to articulate the feminist voice implied in Horney's theory and to use it to create a new social psychology of women.' Horney's early work has come under attack from feminists such as Juliet Mitchell for being biologistic, so a positive, feminist appraisal of her later work is certainly a fresh tack. In refreshingly clear and cogent prose (similar to Horney's itself), Westkott outlines the psychological mechanisms behind the `feminine type' (who she calls `the stepdaughter of masculine civilization'). Her dependency is powerfully described as `the conversion of anger into admiring compliance as a means of warding off fear'. She flees into altruism, providing others with the care that she herself longs for but cannot give to herself. As a basis for these claims, Westkott draws heavily on Horney's "Neurosis and Human Growth", published in 1950. Although she describes at length what she sees as characteristic mechanisms of feminine psychology, she does not - problematically - really substantiate her claim that Horney's theory specifically reflects the psychology of women. Westkott could have contexualised her thesis with more socio-historic detail, which would certainly have made her argument stronger and more convincing. She could also have examined why Horney, having started her career by writing texts specifically on feminine psychology, chose not to pursue this angle in most of her mature theory. Westkott is good, on the other hand, at showing how psychologists such as Alice Miller and Carol Gilligan have been influenced (often unattributedly) by Horney's theories. In her final chapter, she also offers an inspiring interpretation of Horney's therapeutic approaches to show how a feminine type can develop into a female hero: `Whereas the feminine type fled confrontation by accepting abuse and inwardly raged against it, the female hero learns to fight back as a responsibility to herself.' By overcoming her internalization of the cultural definition of what she should be, the female hero is, she argues, fulfilling a social as well as a personal purpose. Such commentary is, I think, attractive not only to feminist theorists and psychologists but can also serve to benefit and inspire women currently undergoing therapy in their journey towards real, authentic selfhood.