Concept
Neurotic trends
Karen Horney's term, from 1939, for the compulsive strivings a person develops to cope with basic anxiety and find safety, such as the need for affection, for power, for perfection or for independence, which she set in place of Freud's instinctual drives. In 1945 she grouped them into three basic attitudes, moving toward people (compliance), moving against people (aggression) and moving away from people (detachment), whose clash forms the basic conflict of neurosis.
- Introduced by
- Karen Horney
- Key works
- 2
- Related
introduced by
- Karen Horney 1939 Horney proposed the term in New Ways in Psychoanalysis as a counterpart to Freud's instinctual drives, and in Our Inner Conflicts regrouped the trends into moving toward, against and away from people.
derives from
- Basic anxiety 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.
gave rise to
- Idealized image In Our Inner Conflicts the idealized image is one of the attempts to solve the conflict between the neurotic trends, by transfiguring them into aspects of a single grand self.