[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 not only a clinical physician; one of the few psychoanalytical writers of recent years to capture the imagination of the general public, she has established a philosophy of human nature and society on the basis of her divergence from Freud and has become, not one of the seminal, but surely one of the symptomatic minds of our time. Her work, therefore, may be judged not merely in a professional but also in a cultural context.

In her latest book [Self-Analysis] Dr. Horney carries her rejection of Freud's theories about as far as it can go short of an explicit denial of the unconscious mind; she propounds the belief that by adapting the techniques of regular analysis a neurotic person can effectually psycho-analyze himself. Judging by the criteria available to a layman, it seems to me that Dr. Horney makes but a weak case for her belief. The evidence she adduces is, in point of quantity, not adequate; in all propriety, so important an idea—important because it controverts one of Freud's fundamental concepts but important too because it is sure to raise hope in so many hearts—should be advanced on a wider and firmer ground of fact. Dr. Horney cites but four illustrative cases of "occasional self-analysis"—that is, of people who, equipped with some degree of psychoanalytical knowledge, were able by their own efforts to gain insight into and relief from some simply motivated psychic disturbance. Of systematic self-analysis she gives but a single example, and the case of Clare, a young woman who ventured into self-analysis after a year and a half of analysis with Dr. Horney, is possibly suggestive but not convincing. This patient no doubt advanced her understanding of her unconscious motives and thereby won a measure of emotional freedom; yet it is not entirely clear why her discoveries about herself—they are not remarkably deep—were not in large part her belated, developing realization of insights to which she had been helped by Dr. Horney in the course of her regular analysis.

In place of evidence Dr. Horney gives us argument and moral exhortation. The argument is dashing but verbalistic and prestidigitary; I shall touch on some of its assumptions below, but I cannot help feeling that, in a popular book like this, exhortation is even more important than argument and that the exhortation is a little irresponsible. When Dr. Horney suggests that one of the advantages of self-analysis is the pride that comes from getting out of neurotic difficulties all by oneself, she implies assent to the popular feeling that there is something "humiliating" about psychoanalysis; and it is hard not to contemplate the even greater pride we might get from bringing ourselves up. When she tells us that, after all, a neurotic lives with himself all the time and therefore knows himself better than anyone else can, I do not understand her. When she tells us that "life itself is the best therapist," I find her trivial.

Then, too, I am disturbed by Dr. Horney's inconsistency in her own statements of the scope and value of self-analysis; she insists on its feasibility, says that some self-analysts have "dealt with problems that are generally deemed inaccessible even with the help of an analyst" and that some have succeeded where analysts have failed, questions whether self-analysis may not be conducted even without the occasional help and supervision which, as a general rule, she feels to be necessary; but when she commits herself to a summation of the possible effectiveness of self-analysis, she is far from sanguine: "Therefore after a period of common work with an analyst even patients who started with severe neurotic difficulties may in some cases be able to continue on their own, if necessary." I feel that a conclusion so tentative on a matter so important should have been confined to a scientific paper, not communicated with enthusiasm and more than a hint of promise to a general public always avid for new ways of psychic self-help.

For psychoanalytical theory the crucial point of Self-Analysis is its substantial denial of Freud's theory of "resistance." According to Freud, the neurosis, however painful, serves a certain purpose; the very symptoms which are so painful cloak impulses which the patient fears and cannot cope with. Even when they are pointed out to him by the analyst, the patient is likely to deny their existence because they are repulsive to his morals and pride; indeed, for a long time he will not even perceive them, for, perverse as the idea may seem, there are powerful forces in the unconscious mind which desire the unhappy neurotic status quo. Dr. Horney does not, to be sure, explicitly reject the theory of resistance which is so basic to the theory of the unconscious, but she does everything possible to minimize the fierce stubbornness Freud attributes to it. She insists that with the right spirit and a sufficient will (knowledge is of far less importance), the patient will be able to bring to light the hidden elements which the unconscious is at such pains to hide. No doubt it is the easier for Dr. Horney to maintain this because in her present book there is no slightest mention of those unconscious drives which are so horrifying to our conscious minds, such as homosexuality, sadism, masochism, Oedipus feelings. (Of course, many educated persons nowadays are willing to admit finding these elements in themselves, but their perception is at most a "novelistic" one, far short in intensity of a psychoanalytical realization.) The effect of Dr. Horney's position is that, though she continues to affirm her belief in the unconscious, she actually denies it by making it an unconscious so easily accessible to an untrained person working on himself; she seems to be talking rather of an "unawareness" or of what, by popular habit, is so often and so significantly substituted for unconscious, a "subconscious."

I have spoken of Dr. Horney as one of the symptomatic minds of our time; she is symptomatic—and most notably in her latest book—of one of the great inadequacies of liberal thought, the need for optimism. It seems to me that her denial or attenuation of most of Freud's concepts is the response to the wishes of an intellectual class which has always found Freud's ideas cogent but too stringent and too dark. They have always wanted a less tragic and strenuous psychology, a more reasonable, decent, and cooperative psyche, and Dr. Homey, in all her three books, has given them what they want.

The basis of Dr. Horney's divergence from Freud is an emotional one; her protest is always that Freud sets gloomy bounds to man's nature, that he is negative, cynical, without "faith." In her present book she quotes with approval a passage from Max Otto: "The deepest source of man's philosophy, the one that shapes and nourishes it, is faith or lack of faith in mankind." But there is no such simple alternative and it is dangerous to suppose there is—as we see when we understand what "faith in mankind" means for Dr. Homey. It means the belief that man is "free" and "good"—she has revived those old, absolute simplicities of eighteenth-century liberalism. To assert man's "freedom" she attacks Freud for finding man's psyche biologically determined; she often speaks of Freud as an old-fashioned dualist (it is clear that he is quite the opposite), but actually her own passionate rejection of the biological determination of mind constitutes a dualism of the most sterile sort and puts the attributes of body in a "lower" place. Further, in attacking Freud for his biological orientation, she makes the tire-some old mistake of confusing mind with the determinants of mind. Then, in the place of Freud's biological determination she puts a determination by culture: there can be no doubt that Dr. Horney has done psychoanalysis a service by forcing the cultural issue; Freud's views of culture, though suggestive, are surely not adequate. But Dr. Horney's view of culture is both vague and formalistic. Sometimes culture is a norm by which we judge whether or not a certain way of action is neurotic, but then again a culture may itself be neurotic, though by what norm we judge the culture (possibly a biological one?) we are not told. In Dr. Horney's hands culture becomes as much an absolute as she claims biology is in Freud's; but Freud saw a complex and passionate interplay betwen biology and culture, whereas Dr. Horney sees the individual infant as a kind of box into which culture drops this trend or that. The Freudian man may not be as free as we should like, but at least he has insides.

Then, in order to affirm that man is "good," Dr. Horney, like Erich Fromm, attacks Freud's theory of morals for representing morals as arising from forces themselves not virtuous. This Dr. Horney calls a fallacy of genesis, which of course it is not. She represents Freud as implying that virtue is not virtue because it springs from destructive or anarchic origins, but this Freud never does imply—Dr. Horney, by the way, is not the most reliable expositor of Freud; indeed, if anyone has committed the genetic fallacy, Dr. Horney has done so by implying that virtue can only be virtue if it springs from innate (biological?) virtue.

If we are to talk of faith in man, in the realistic rather than the sentimental sense of that phrase, it seems to me that of the two psychologies it is Freud's that demonstrates faith by daring to present man with the terrible truth of his own nature. When Dr. Horney speaks of faith, she does not mean faith so much as optimism, that emptiest of words. The psyche she has described has won wide assent in liberal, progressive circles exactly because it is a progressive psyche, a kind of New Deal agency which truly intends to do good but cannot always cope with certain reactionary forces. It is a flattering view of the mind and Freud's is not, but Freud's has the advantage of suggesting the savage difficulties of life.