Karen Horney was an M.D. who became one of the earliest practitioners of psychoanalysis in Berlin. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1932 and joined the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1942, she made a dramatic walkout from the Institute, followed by many of its members, in protest of its rigid Freudian theory of female development.
Karen Horney published numerous books, and one of the most famous was The Neurotic Personality of Our TIme (1937). Her books developed a significant lay following, but until the late1980's, her work was largely ignored or denigrated by her peers. Posthumously, she began getting the recognition from psychologists which, in her lifetime, was withheld or given wrongly to others. She is now regarded as having been a pioneer in social psychology and female psychological development.
This biography (see it on Amazon) is an ambitious work of history, setting the stage for each new development in Karen's life with great care. It mercilessly exposes the in-fighting which has haunted Freudian psychoanalysis from its professional beginnings in the 1920's, and it attempts to understand a woman whose life was quite daring in comparison with the norms of her day. Can you imagine, for example, what it was like to be one of the first women to become a
medical doctor, let alone a psychologist, as well as something of a
pioneer in, say, owning property or publishing books?
I would have had the author try a little less to get inside her subject's head, but the story is so exhaustively researched and documented that I was willing to put up with that. I liked that the author did not try to soften the sharp edges of the personality of Karen Horney, who apparently was difficult in some ways as well as brilliant. And as with all cases of misogyny, the question always arises of how much criticism from others was deserved, vs. how much was a result of professional jealousy intensified and amplified by disrespect of females in professional settings. These agonizing questions of balance are still highly relevant to women today.
---- FOOTNOTE: I wrote the above review in 1988 for WoNet News, an
internet newsgroup, and I'm republishing it here, with a few edits.
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Book Review: Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr
This book (see it on Amazon) speaks strongly to me of events rememberred from my childhood in the South. It is a biography compiled from interviews taped in the mid-1970's by scholars of oral history. Its language is rich and free like a spoken conversation, full of anecdotes and amusing descriptions. It is both social history and the personal story of Virginia Foster Durr's life. I enjoyed it and recommend it hightly.
Born into a well-off white family in Alabama in 1903, Virginia eventually endured ostracism and defamation for her support of civil rights. Her interviews provided a vivid account of the paranoia of the McCarthy era and tthe racism and severe economic problems in the South up through the 1960's.
Her influence derived from at least three factors. One was her husband clifton Durr, who became head of the Federal Communications Commission and later was a leading civil rights lawyer. Another factor was her sister's marriage to supreme court Justice Hugo Black. And finally there was her own well-formed mind. About the importance of her marriage, she said, "It was only after I was safely married that I could really be interested in anything... Old maids were pitied not just because they had no husband but because a life without a husband meant a life of poverty."
The in-her-time-prevailing racism of thhe South is vividly captured in this book, as in the following description of one Southern senator: "[He] talked race all the time...he would always go on about the sex thing. If anything happened to change the Southern system, the white women would just rush to get a black man. We'd have a race of mulattoes. He and others like him seemed maniacal on the subject of sex...These men...would get up and make vile speeches about white women of the South and how they were protecting them. Every black man wanted to rape a white woman and every white woman apparently wanted to be raped...they showed a kind of sickness...I really think those fears came from the fact that the white men of the South had had so many sexual affairs with black women...It's the only thing I can figure out that made them so crazy on the subject."
---- FOOTNOTE: I wrote the above review in 1988 for WoNet News, an internet newsgroup, and I'm republishing it here and now because all its topics are still relevant for women.
Born into a well-off white family in Alabama in 1903, Virginia eventually endured ostracism and defamation for her support of civil rights. Her interviews provided a vivid account of the paranoia of the McCarthy era and tthe racism and severe economic problems in the South up through the 1960's.
Her influence derived from at least three factors. One was her husband clifton Durr, who became head of the Federal Communications Commission and later was a leading civil rights lawyer. Another factor was her sister's marriage to supreme court Justice Hugo Black. And finally there was her own well-formed mind. About the importance of her marriage, she said, "It was only after I was safely married that I could really be interested in anything... Old maids were pitied not just because they had no husband but because a life without a husband meant a life of poverty."
The in-her-time-prevailing racism of thhe South is vividly captured in this book, as in the following description of one Southern senator: "[He] talked race all the time...he would always go on about the sex thing. If anything happened to change the Southern system, the white women would just rush to get a black man. We'd have a race of mulattoes. He and others like him seemed maniacal on the subject of sex...These men...would get up and make vile speeches about white women of the South and how they were protecting them. Every black man wanted to rape a white woman and every white woman apparently wanted to be raped...they showed a kind of sickness...I really think those fears came from the fact that the white men of the South had had so many sexual affairs with black women...It's the only thing I can figure out that made them so crazy on the subject."
---- FOOTNOTE: I wrote the above review in 1988 for WoNet News, an internet newsgroup, and I'm republishing it here and now because all its topics are still relevant for women.
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