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.