Psychoanalytic Social Theory

“Everyone is a real or potential competitor of everyone else”

- Karen Horney
BIOGRAPHY
Full Name:Karen Danielsen Horney

Birthday: September 15, 1885

Birthplace: Eilbak, Germany

Father: Berndt (wackels) Daneilsen (sea captain)

Mother: Cothilda van Ronzelen Danielsen

Husband: Oskar Horney

Death: December 4, 1952 (CANCER)

Deathplace: New York, USA

Significant part in her life:

- Great hostility toward his father; idolized her mother her
independence.
- Analysis with Karl Abraham, association with Margaret
Mean, John Dollard and others.
- Acquaintances with Erich Fromm and his wife.
- Leadership in Association for the Advancement of
Psychoanalysis – Karen Horney.

Psychoanalytic Institute
- Establishment of Karen Horney Clinic.

Please mark these TRUE or FALSE as they apply to you.

1. It’s very important to me to please other people.
2. When I feel distressed, I seek out an emotionally strong person
to tell my troubles to.
3. I prefer routine more than change.
4. I enjoy being in a powerful leadership position.
5. I believe in and follow the advice: “Do unto others before they
can do unto me”
6. I enjoy being the life of the party.
7. It’s very important to me to be recognized for my accomplishments.
8. I enjoy seeing the achievements of my friends.
9. I usually end relationships when they begin to get too close.
10. It’s very difficult for me to overlook my own mistakes and
personal flaws.

These questions represent 10 important needs proposed by Karen

Horney. We discuss these items in the section on neurotic needs.
Please know that marking an item in the direction of neurotic
needs does not indicate that you are emotionally unstable or
driven by neurotic needs.

Psychoanalytic Social Theory

 Social and cultural conditions, especially childhood experiences, are largely
responsible for shaping personality.

- People who do not have their needs for love and affection satisfied during
childhood and develops basic hostility toward their parents and as a
consequence suffer from basic anxiety.
- Insisted that social rather than biological forces are paramount in
personality development.

The Impact of Culture

- Although Horney did not overlook the importance of genetic factors, she
repeatedly emphasized cultural influences as the primary bases for both
neurotic and normal personality development.

The Importance of Childhood Experiences

- She hypothesized that a difficult childhood is primarily responsible for

neurotic needs Horney (1939)
- The sum total of childhood experiences bring about a certain character
structure, or rather, start its development but not responsible for later
personality.

Basic Hostility and Basic Anxiety

• Children need to experience both genuine love and healthy discipline.

Such conditions provide them with feelings of safety and satisfaction and
permit them to grow in accordance with their real self.
 Basic Hostility

- Developed feelings of children when parents do not satisfy the child’s

needs for security and satisfaction.

Basic Anxiety

- Repressed hostility that leads to profound feelings of insecurity and a

vague sense of apprehension.
- Basic Anxiety itself is not a neurosis, but “it is the nutritive soil out of
which a definite neurosis may develop at any time” (Horney, 1937, p. 89)
- Basic Hostility and Basic Anxiety is inextricably interwoven.

Ways of protecting oneself from feeling of being alone in a potentially hostile

world (PROTECTIVE DEVICES):

Affection

- A strategy that does not always lead to authentic love; try to purchase
love with self- effacing compliance, material-goods, or some sexual
flavors.

Submissiveness

- Submit themselves either to people or to institutions.

Power

- Defense against the real or imagined hostility of others and takes the form
of a tendency to dominate others.

• Prestige – a protection against humiliation and is expressed as a

 tendency to humiliate others.
• Possession – acts as butter against destitution and poverty and manifests
itself as a tendency to deprive others.

Withdrawal

- Developing an independence from others or by becoming emotionally

detached from them, feeling that they cannot be hurt by others.

COMPULSIVE DRIVES
- Neurotic individuals have the same problems that affect
normal people, except neurotics experience them to a
greater degree.
- Everyone uses the various protective devices to guard against the
rejection, hostility, and competitiveness of others. But whereas
normal individuals are able to use a variety of defensive
maneuvers in a somewhat useful way, neurotics compulsively
repeat the same strategy in an essentially unproductive manner.
NEUROTIC NEEDS
▪ For affection and approval
- Attempt to please others; live up with the expectations of others.
▪ For a powerful partner
- Lacking self-confidence, neurotics try to attach themselves to
powerful partner.
▪ The neurotic need to restrict one’s life within narrow borders
- Neurotics frequently strive to remain inconspicuous, to take
second place, and to be content with very little. They downgrade
their own abilities and dread making demands on others.
▪ For power
- Need to control others and to avoid feelings of weakness or stupidity.
▪ To exploit others
- Evaluate others on the basis of how they can used or exploited;
fear being exploited by others.
▪ For social recognition or prestige
- Trying to be fist, to be important, or to attract attention to
themselves.
▪ For personal admiration
- Need to be admired for what they have are rather that for what they
possess.
▪ For ambition and personal achievement
- Strong drive to be the best; they must defeat other people in
order to confirm their superiority.
▪ For self-sufficiency and independence
- Strong need to move away from other people; they can get along
without others.
▪ For perfection and unassailability
▪ Dread making mistakes and having personal flaws, and they
desperately attempt to hide their weaknesses from others.

NEUROTIC TRENDS
- People can use each neurotic trends to solve basic conflict, but
unfortunately these solutions are essentially non-productive or
 neurotic.
• Horney (1950) used the term basic conflict because
very young children are driven in all three directions –
toward, against, and away from people.
Moving Toward People (Compliant Personality)
- A neurotic need to protect oneself against feelings of
helplessness.
Moving Against People (Aggressive Personality)
- Take for granted that everyone is hostile.
Moving Away from People (Detached Personality)
- Alleviating feelings of isolation.
- Expression of a needs for privacy, independence, and self-
sufficiency.

INTRAPSYCHIC CONFLICTS
Intrapsychic processes originate from interpersonal experiences; they
become part of a person’s belief system; they develop a life of their own
– an existence separate from the interpersonal conflicts that gave them
life.
Idealized Self-Image
- An attempt to solve conflicts by painting a godlike picture of
oneself.
- This dilemma can be solved only by creating an idealized
self-image, an extravagantly positive view of themselves that
exists only in their personal belief system.
- These people endow themselves with infinite powers and
unlimited capabilities; they see themselves as “a hero, a
genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god”
- Rather than growing toward self-realization, they move
toward actualizing their idealized self.

3 Aspects of Idealized Image

Neurotic Search for Glory - comprehensive drive to actualizing

the ideal self. The 3 elements are:

• Need for perfection – to mold the whole personality into idealized

self. Tyranny of the should: attempt to realize an unattainable self-
image by denying the true self and behaving in terms of what we
think we should be doing.
• Neurotic ambition – compulsive drive toward superiority.
• Drive toward a vindictive triumph – drive for
achievement or success through inflicting pain, suffering or
shame (the most destructive element of all)
▪ Neurotic Claims – unrealistic demands and
expectations of neurotics to be entitled to special
privilege.
▪ Neurotic Pride – a false pride based not on a realistic view
of the true self but a spurious, image of the idealized self.
▪ Self-Hatred – when people realize that their real self does not
match the insatiable demands of their idealized self, they will
being to hate and despise themselves.

6 Major Ways in Expressing Self-Hatred

• Relentless demands of the self – people continue to

push themselves toward perfection because they believe
that they should be perfect.
• Merciless self-accusation – constantly berate themselves.
• Self-Contempt – belittling, disparaging, doubting, discrediting and
ridiculing oneself.
• Self-Frustration – involves postponing or forgoing pleasurable
activities in order to achieve reasonable goals. Neurotics are
frequently shackled by taboos against enjoyment.
• Self-Torment or Self-Torture – inflict harm or suffering on
themselves.
• Self-Destructive actions and impulses – overeating,
abusing alcohol and other drugs, working too hard, driving
recklessly and suicide.
FEMININE PSYCHOLOGY
- A revision of psychoanalysis to encompass the psychological
conflicts inherent in the traditional ideal of womanhood and
women’s roles:
▪ Oedipus Complex – found only in some people and is an
expression of the neurotic need for love; child’s main goal is
security, not sexual intercourse.
▪ Womb Envy – envy a man feels toward female for bearing children.
▪ Masculine Protest – pathological belief that men are superior
to women.

- The desire for penis is not an expression of penis envy but rather a
wish for all those qualities or privileges which in our culture are
regarded as masculine.

PSYCHOTHERAPY
Horneyian Therapy

- Help patients gradually grow in the direction of self-realization.

- To have patients give up their idealized self-image, relinquish
their neurotic search for glory, and change self-hatred to an
acceptance of the real self.
Real Self – the potential for growth beyond the artificial idealized self.

- Three neurotic friends can be cast in favourable terms such

as love, mastery or freedom.
- Convince patients that their present solutions are
perpetuating rather than alleviating the core neurosis.

Dream Interpretation

- Attempts to solve conflicts, but the solutions can be either neurotic

or healthy.

Free Association

- Patients are asked to say everything that comes to mind

regardless of how trivial or embarrassing it may seem.
- Eventually reveals patients’ idealized self-image and
persistent but unsuccessful attempts at accomplishing it .