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.
Development
1937
introduced by Karen Horney
Horney named basic anxiety in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and kept it as the starting point of her later theory of neurosis.
In Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (1945);The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937)
Relations
- 1937 introduced by Karen Horney
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.
Works
- 1937
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
Horney's first book describes the character structure she found common to the neurotic people of her time and culture. It is concerned less with individual case histories than with the conflicts that recur among them. Its premise is that neuroses are generated not only by incidental individual experiences but also by the specific cultural conditions in which people live, so that what counts as neurotic varies with the culture. Horney says that her interpretation rests fundamentally on Freudian ground, but that strict adherence to Freud's theories carries the danger of stagnation. Anxiety stands at the centre. Its root is basic anxiety, an insidiously increasing, all-pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile world, and it is bound up with a basic hostility. People try to protect themselves from this anxiety in four principal ways: affection, submissiveness, power and withdrawal. What drives these needs is reassurance rather than pleasure. The middle chapters examine the neurotic need for affection and its insatiability, the quest for power, prestige and possession, and neurotic competitiveness and the recoil from competition. Later chapters treat neurotic guilt feelings and the meaning of neurotic suffering, including masochism. The final chapter traces the typical neurotic conflicts to contradictions in the culture itself. The neurotic shares these conflicts with everyone, and differs from the normal person only quantitatively.
- 1939
Horney's second book takes up Freud's theory point by point, to separate what she held to be its lasting findings from the premises she thought had hampered it. She keeps what she calls Freud's fundamental findings: that psychic processes are strictly determined, that actions and feelings may have unconscious motives and that resistance guards them, the role of emotional forces and conflict, repression and the other defences, the meaning of dreams, the formative power of early experience, transference and free association. She rejects his instinct theory and the mechanistic and evolutionistic thinking beneath it, together with his neglect of culture. Her thesis is that psychoanalysis should outgrow the limits set by its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology. She says that she is not founding a new school. Successive chapters re-examine the libido theory, which she judges unsubstantiated, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, feminine psychology and the death instinct. They also treat the emphasis on childhood, transference, culture and neurosis, the ego and the id, anxiety, the super-ego, neurotic guilt feelings and masochistic phenomena. In place of instinctual drives she puts neurotic trends. These are strivings for safety and satisfaction, such as the need for affection or for perfection, by which a person who feels helpless in a hostile world copes with it in some measure of safety. Anxiety arises when such a safety device is endangered. The last chapter, on therapy, sets as its aim restoring the patient to themself, so that the safety devices are no longer needed and spontaneity returns. Horney acknowledges debts to Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Harald Schultz-Hencke and Max Horkheimer. She credits Fromm with showing how central the loss of self is to neurosis.
- 1945
Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis
In this book Horney sets out a theory of neurosis centred on conflict between incompatible attitudes toward other people. In the introduction she traces her path away from Freud. It began with doubts about his feminine psychology and led, with Erich Fromm's help, to the cultural conditions of neurosis. She came to hold that neuroses are generated by disturbances in human relationships, and that the libido theory was no longer tenable. The ten neurotic trends she had listed in Self-Analysis are here regrouped into three basic attitudes: moving toward people, moving against them and moving away from them. Each overstresses one element of basic anxiety: helplessness, hostility or isolation. Their clash is the basic conflict, the dynamic centre of neurosis. Freud saw conflict as a battle between repressed and repressing forces, universal and in principle insoluble. Horney places it between contradictory neurotic trends and holds that it can be resolved where it arises. The book then examines the neurotic's attempts at a solution. One side of the conflict may be suppressed, or the person may withdraw into detachment. The idealized image is the most important attempt: in it the conflicting trends appear not as conflicts but as aspects of a rich personality. Externalization is the tendency to experience inner processes as though they occurred outside oneself. It is wider than projection, and Horney calls it an active process of self-elimination. Further auxiliary approaches, among them arbitrary rightness, rigid self-control and cynicism, serve to keep up an artificial harmony. A second part describes what unresolved conflicts cost: fears, impoverishment of the personality, hopelessness and sadistic trends. The conclusion holds that neurotic conflicts cannot be resolved by rational decision, but only by changing the inner conditions that brought them about. Against what she calls the pessimism of Freud's psychology, Horney affirms that a person can change and go on changing as long as they live.
See also
People
References
- Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis1945Evidence for a relation
- The Neurotic Personality of Our Time1937Evidence for a relation
- New Ways in Psychoanalysis1939Evidence for a relation