Concept
Real self
In Karen Horney's late theory, the central inner force, common to all people yet unique in each, that is the source of spontaneous feeling, genuine wishes and growth; she distinguished it both from the actual self, the person as they are at a given moment, and from the idealized self. Neurosis is, in her account, an alienation from the real self, and therapy aims to free its forces toward self-realization.
Development
1945
introduced by Karen Horney
The real self is set against the idealized image in Our Inner Conflicts and becomes the centre of Neurosis and Human Growth, whose chapter on alienation from self treats neurosis as estrangement from it.
In Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization (1950);Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (1945)
Relations
- 1945 introduced by Karen Horney
The real self is set against the idealized image in Our Inner Conflicts and becomes the centre of Neurosis and Human Growth, whose chapter on alienation from self treats neurosis as estrangement from it.
- opposes Idealized image
Horney defines the two against each other: the more the idealized image takes hold, the more the real self is dimmed.
Works
- 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.
- 1950
Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization
Horney's last book gives the most complete statement of her theory of neurosis, built on the opposition between the real self and an idealized self. Under adverse conditions a person abandons the real self for an idealized self. From this follows the search for glory. It brings neurotic claims, the tyranny of the should, neurotic pride and self-hate, and with them alienation from the self. Horney describes three main solutions to the conflicts this produces: the expansive, the self-effacing and the resigned. They continue the moving against, toward and away from people of her earlier work. Therapy is framed as freeing the forces of self-realization.
See also
People
References
- Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization1950Evidence for a relation
- Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis1945Evidence for a relation