Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Horney, Karen - Lionel Trilling (essay date 1942)

Lionel Trilling (essay date 1942)

SOURCE: "The Progressive Psyche," in The Nation (New York), Vol. 155, No. 11, September 12, 1942, pp. 215-17.

[Trilling was one of the most respected literary critics in the United States. Among his most significant works are The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950) and Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1956). In the following largely negative review of Self-Analysis, he argues that Horney's criticisms of Sigmund Freud's theories represent a politically and ideologically liberal desire to view the psyche in hopeful and flattering terms. Trilling states that while Freud's view is darker than Horney's, it more adequately addresses "the savage difficulties of life."]

Readers of this review, like its writer, will be diffident of judging the technical grounds on which Dr. Karen Horney has forced a schism in the ranks of American psychoanalysis. But Dr. Horney is...

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