The German Genius

Discontents ) was much more timely. There had been famine in Austria and attempted revolution and mega-inflation in Germany, while capitalism appeared to have collapsed in America. The devastation and moral degeneration of World War I was still a concern to many people, Hitler was on the rise. Wherever you looked, Freud’s title fitted the facts. 2
    In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud developed some of the ideas he had explored in Totem and Taboo, in particular that society—civilization—evolves out of the need to curb the individual’s unruly sexual and aggressive appetites. He now argued that civilization, suppression, and neurosis are inescapably intertwined because the more civilization there is, the more suppression of the instincts is needed and, as a direct result, the more neurosis. Man, he said, cannot help but become more and more unhappy in civilization, which explains why so many seek refuge in drink, drugs, or religion. Given this basic predicament, it is the individual’s “psychical constitution” that determines how any individual adjusts. For example, “The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships with other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental process.” We are, he insisted, progressively more and more cut off—alienated—from each other. The point of his book, he said, was not to offer easy panaceas but to suggest that ethics—the rules by which men agree to live together—can benefit from psychoanalytic understanding.
    Freud’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. The 1930s, as we know now, were, as one historian put it, a “dark valley” ethically. 3 Not surprisingly, therefore, his book spawned a raft of others that, though very different, were all profoundly uneasy with Western capitalist society.
    The book closest to Freud’s was published in 1933 by the former crown prince of psychoanalysis, now turned archrival. Carl Jung’s argument in Modern Man in Search of a Soul was that psychoanalysis, by replacing the soul with the psyche, only offered a palliative. 4 Psychoanalysis, as a technique, could only be used on an individual basis; it could not become “organized” and used to help millions at a time, such as, for example, Catholicism. And so, the “participation mystique,” as the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it, was a whole dimension of life closed to modern man. This lack of a collective life, ceremonies of the whole as Hugo von Hofmannsthal called them, was the main ingredient in neurosis, and the general anxiety.
    For fifteen years, Karen Horney practiced in Weimar Germany as an orthodox Freudian analyst, alongside Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham, and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Only after she moved to the United States, first as associate director of the Chicago Institute and then in New York, at the New School for Social Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, did she find herself capable of offering criticism of the founder of the movement. Her book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, overlapped with both Freud and Jung but was also an attack on capitalistic society for the way it induced neurosis.
    Horney’s chief criticism of Freud was his antifeminist bias (her early papers included “The Dread of Women” and “The Denial of the Vagina”). 5 She was also a Marxist and thought Freud too biological in outlook and “deeply ignorant” of modern anthropology and sociology. Horney took the line that “there is no such thing as a universal normal psychology.” For her, however, two traits invariably characterized all neurotics. The first was “rigidity in reaction,” and the second was “a discrepancy between potentiality and achievement.” Horney didn’t believe in the Oedipus complex either. She preferred the notion of “basic anxiety,” which she attributed not to biology but to the conflicting forces of society, conflicts that act on an individual from childhood. Basic anxiety she characterized as a feeling of “being small, insignificant, helpless, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy.” Such anxiety is worse, she said, when parents fail to give their children warmth and affection. Such a child grows up with one of four rigid ways of approaching life, which interfere with