Concept
Basic anxiety
In Karen Horney's theory, the pervasive feeling a child comes to have of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world, produced not by instinctual frustration but by disturbed relations with parents who fail to give warmth, respect and reliable care. It is bound up with a basic hostility the child must repress, and the strategies a person develops to feel safe against it, the neurotic trends, form the core of neurosis.
Read more- Introduced by
- Karen Horney
- Key works
- 3
- Related
- Neurotic trends
introduced by
- Karen Horney 1937 Horney named basic anxiety in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and kept it as the starting point of her later theory of neurosis.
gave rise to
- Neurotic trends Horney presents the neurotic trends as the child's ways of securing safety against basic anxiety, each of the three later attitudes stressing one of its elements.