Although Honey is known as one of the representatives of "Neo-Freudianism", her views are significantly different from Freud's.

Honey opposes the idea that "childhood experience determines life" and is critical of the over-emphasis on early experiences in contemporary psychoanalysis. She believes that experience itself is important, but psychoanalysis should be based on the individual's current mental state and pay attention to the solution of current problems.

Honey's point of view is consistent with social psychology. She agrees with Freud's argument that unconscious impulse determines people's behavior, but resolutely opposes Freud's idea that unconscious impulse is an impulse of sexual instinct and the development of primitive sexual desire is used to explain the formation of personality. She believes that human mental conflicts are closely related to the social environment, and fundamentally come from psychological conflicts related to basic anxiety, and abnormal psychology related to sex is only one of its manifestations, and not all psychological problems are related to sex.

when honey was a teacher of orthodox theory in Berlin psychoanalytic institute, she began to refute Freud's theories about penis envy, female masochism and female development, and tried to replace the popular male-centered female psychology view with a female standpoint. Although at first she tried to revise psychoanalysis from the inside, she finally challenged many preconditions of this theory and then developed her own theory.

Honey's thesis on female psychology completely breaks away from Freud's creed that anatomical structure is fate, and emphasizes that cultural factors are the important inducement of female problems and their gender orientation. Honey believes that women's mental disorder is based on jealousy of male penis, but it is not penis itself but male privilege. Taking alfred adler's point of view, Honey pointed out that women want to be men because they want to have the qualities or privileges that our culture thinks belong to men, such as strength, courage, independence, success, sexual freedom and the right to choose a partner, which are determined by cultural factors rather than biological factors. Honey also pointed out that when men find that they don't have the instinct of pregnancy and childbirth, they will have jealousy and inferiority, so the enterprising spirit shown by men and striving for success are the compensation for this inferiority complex. Although honey devoted most of her career to writing about women's psychology, she gave up the topic in 1935. Because she feels that the role of culture in the formation of women's psychology makes her unable to confirm which psychology is unique to women and which is not.

She pointed out: Due to the complicated social environment, it is impossible to really distinguish the psychological differences between women and men at present; The primary task of psychologists should not be to explore the "female essence", but to promote the perfection of the whole human personality. From then on, Honey began to develop her theory that is neutral and equally applicable to both sexes.