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.
Development
1939
introduced by Karen Horney
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.
In New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939);Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (1945)
Relations
- 1939 introduced by Karen Horney
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.
Works
- 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
- New Ways in Psychoanalysis1939Evidence for a relation
- Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis1945Evidence for a relation