Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Horney, Karen - Cyril Connolly (essay date 1940)

Cyril Connolly (essay date 1940)

SOURCE: "Psycho-analysis," in The Condemned Play-ground: Essays, 1927-1944, New York: Macmillan, 1946, pp. 227-30.

[Connolly was a very influential English critic, nonfiction writer, and literary jounal editor. In the following review, originally published in 1940, he praises the accessibility of Horney's prose in New Ways in Psychoanalysis and the humanity of her approach to psychotherapy.]

Psycho-analysis leads to the most profound discoveries man has made about himself. Yet most people would agree that its results have been disappointing. The cures are few, and seem confined to certain extreme cases, while the neurotic infirmities of human beings increase out of all proportion. Of the two or three hundred Londoners I know, almost all between the ages of twenty-five and forty would be improved by analysis in so far as they are neurotic cases. But many border-liners are in a state of flux. When...

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