Karen Horney: neurotic needs and trends

Karen Horney was an early 20th century psychoanalyst. Her critique of some of
Sigmund Freud's views led to the founding of feminist psychology.
Horney’s theory was strongly influenced by her personal experiences in
childhood and adolescence, as well as by social and cultural forces that were
different from those that had influenced Freud
Her differences with Freud began when she took issue with his psychological
portrayal of women.
An early feminist, she argued that psychoanalysis focused more on men’s
development than on women’s. To counter Freud’s theory that women are
driven by penis envy, she proposed that men are jelous of women for their
ability to give birth.
Life of Horney:
Neglected second born:
Karen Horney was born near Hamburg, Germany, in 1885. Her older brother
Berndth was more attractive and charming so horney was always jelous about
her brother.. she also jelous of him because he was boy and girls were
consider inferior. On time of her birth her father was 50 yrs old ship captain
Norwegian background. her father and mother have differ temperament i.e
like … her father was religious, arrogant, domineering but her mother was
attractive and freethinking person.. she told young karen that she did not
married him for love but for fear of being spinster like without being married..
Search for love:
During his childhood days she doubted her parents that they like her and then
she also believed that they had more love on her brother than in her
“Why is everything beautiful on earth given to me, only not the highest thing,
not love!”
Father always give downgrade comments about her intelligence and
appearance.
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Rebellion and hostility:
At earlier days to get her mother’s affection she acted like obedient child.
Eventhough she taken many effort to get her mothers affection she was
thinking like .. she is not receiving sufficient love. Her self-sacrifice and good
behavior were not working. So she become disobedient… deciding that
suppose if she could not have love and security, she would take revenge for
her feelings of unattractiveness
“If I would not be beautiful I decided I would be smart”
After her adult, she realized that how much opposition she developed when
she was a child. Her personality theory describes how a lack of love in
childhood fosters anxiety and hostility.
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Still searching for love:
At 14, she developed crush on a teacher and then She continued to have
infatuations with her teachers, in the confused and unhappy way . At 17, she
awakened to the reality of sex and soon met a man she described as her first
real love, but the relationship lasted only two days. Horney decided that being
in love eliminate her anxiety and insecurity temporarily
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Marriage and career:
Horney’s search for a career was straightforward and successful. She decided
at age 12, after being treated kindly by a physician, that she would become a
doctor. Horney was able to enroll in University of Freiburg Medical School, one
of a few medical schools admitting women at that time. She transferred from
there to the University of Gottingen and finally to the University of Berlin in
1909, where Horney elected to study the emerging field of
psychoanalysis. While in school, she met her husband, Oskar Horney; they
married in 1910 and raised three daughters. Horney graduated from the
University of Berlin in 1913.she felt overburden with unhappiness and
oppression (harshness) When she realized these attachments were not
helping to alleviate her depression and other emotional problems, she decided
to undergo psychoanalysis.
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Horney psychoanalysis:
Horney Underwent Freudian psychoanalysis The analysis was not a success.
She decided that Freudian psychoanalysis was of only minimal help to her, and
she turned instead to self-analysis, a practice she continued for the rest of her
life. During her self-analysis, Horney was strongly influenced by Adler’s notion
of compensation for inferiority feelings She was particularly sensitive to Adler’s
remark that physical unattractiveness was a cause of inferiority feelings. She
concluded that she “needed to feel superior because of her lack of beauty and
sense of inferiority as a woman, which led her to masculine protest.
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Still searching for love:
Horney’s search for love and security continued when she immigrated to the
United States. Her most intense love affair was with another analyst, Erich
Fromm, who was 15 years younger. but then unfortunately it come to an end
after 20 years that hurted her deeply. One event that led to the breakdown of
the relationship was that she convinced Fromm to analyze her daughter
Marriane. Fromm helped the woman to understand her hostility toward her
mother, giving Marriane the confidence to oppose Horney for the first time.
Horney served on the faculty of psychoanalytic institutes in Chicago and New
York. She was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of
Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. In l941, she
began the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. For many years she was a
popular lecturer, writer, and therapist.
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Childhood need for safety and security:
Horney agreed with Freud on one major point i.e. how early years of childhood
is important in shaping the adult personality. Horney believed that childhood
was dominated by the safety need, by which she meant that she needs security
and freedom from fear. infants experience a feeling of security and an
absence of fear that will decide the normality of their personality
development. Horney believed that only social forces in childhood, influence
personality development. A child’s security depends entirely on how the
parents treat the child. The major way parents weaken or prevent security is
by displaying a lack of warmth and affection. That was Horney’s situation in
childhood. Her parents provided very little warmth and affection, and she, in
turn, later behaved the same way with her three daughters.
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Repressing hostility towards parents:
If parents do not satisfy the child’s needs for safety and satisfaction, the child
develops feelings of basic hostility toward the parents. However, children
seldom overtly express this hostility as temper; instead, they repress their
hostility toward their parents and have no awareness of it. Repressed hostility
then leads to feelings of insecurity. Horney placed great importance on the
infant’s helplessness, which depends totally on their parents’ behavior. If
children are kept in an excessively dependent state, then their feelings of
helplessness will be encouraged. The more helpless children feel, the less they
dare to oppose against the parents.
Children can easily be made to feel fearful of their parents through
punishment, physical abuse, or more subtle forms of intimidation. The more
frightened children become, the more they will repress their hostility.
love can be another reason for repressing hostility toward parents. In this case,
parents tell their children how much they love them and how much they are
sacrificing for them, but their affection are not honest.
Children recognize that such behaviors are poor alternative for genuine love
and security. The child must repress his or her hostility for fear of losing even
these unsatisfactory love.
Guilt is yet another reason why children repress hostility. They are often made
to feel guilty about any hostility or rebelliousness. They may be made to feel
unworthy for expressing or even maintaining hard feelings toward their
parents.
The more guilt the child feels, the more deeply repressed will be the hostility
which is resulting from various parental behaviour
Way of undermining child’s security:
Parents can act in various ways to undermine their child’s security and thereby
induce hostility. These include obvious preference for one sibling over another,
unfair punishment, erratic behavior
The child may feel the need to repress the hostility that was induced by the
parents’ undermining behaviors for reasons of helplessness, fear of the
parents, need for genuine love, or guilt feelings.
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Basic anxiety the foundation of neurosis:
Horney defined basic anxiety that it is a feeling of being isolated and helpless
in a world conceived as potentially hostile”.
Basic anxiety result from parental threats or from a defence against hostility
Hostile impulses are the principal source of basic anxiety, but basic anxiety can
also contribute to feelings of hostility. Although she later alter her list of
defenses against basic anxiety, Horney identified four general ways that people
protect themselves against this feeling of being alone in a potentially hostile
world.
First one is secure affection,
It is a strategy that does not always lead to authentic love. In their search for
affection, some people may try to purchase love with self-effacing compliance,
material goods, or sexual favors. There are several ways by which we may gain
affection, such as trying to
✓ Do whatever other person wants
✓ Bribe others
✓ Threatening others into providing the desired affection

Being submissive:
✓ Submissive people avoid doing anything that might antagonize (cause
someone to become hostile)
✓ Repress their personal desire
Neurotics person may submit themselves either to people or to institutions
such as an organization or a religion. Neurotics who submit to another person
often do so in order to gain affection. Neurotics may also try to protect
themselves by striving for power, prestige, or possession.
Attaining power:
By attaining power over others, a person can compensate for helplessness and
achieve security through success or through a sense of superiority. Such
people seem to believe that if they have power, no one will harm them. This
could describe Horney’s childhood once she decided to strive for academic
success.
Withdrawing:
Neurotics frequently protect themselves against basic anxiety either by
developing an independence from others or by becoming emotionally
detached from them. By psychologically withdrawing, neurotics feel that they
cannot be hurt by other people.
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Characteristics of self protective mechanism:
The four self-protective mechanisms Horney proposed have a single goal: to
defend against basic anxiety. They motivate the person to seek security and
reassurance rather than happiness or pleasure.
neurotic will pursue the search for safety and security by using more than one
of these mechanisms, and the incompatibility among them can lay the
groundwork for additional problems. For example, a person may be driven by
the needs to attain power and to gain affection. A person may want to submit
to others while also desiring power over them. Such incompatibilities cannot
be resolved and can lead to even more severe disaggreement.
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Neurotic needs:

Horney tentatively identified 10 categories of neurotic needs that characterize

neurotics in their attempts to combat basic anxiety. These needs were more
specific than the four protective devices discussed earlier, but they describe the
same basic defensive strategies.

1. The neurotic need for affection and approval. In their quest for affection and
approval, neurotics attempt indiscriminately to please others. They try to live up
to the expectations of others, tend to dread self-assertion, and are quite
uncomfortable with the hostility of others as well as the hostile feelings within
themselves.
2. The neurotic need for a powerful partner. Lacking self-confidence, neurotics
try to attach themselves to a powerful partner. This need includes an
overvaluation of love and a dread of being alone or deserted. Horney’s own life
story reveals a strong need to relate to a great man, and she had a series of such
relationships during her adult life.

4. The neurotic need for power. Power and affection are perhaps the two
greatest neurotic needs. The need for power is usually combined with the needs
for prestige and possession and manifests itself as the need to control others
and to avoid feelings of weakness or stupidity.

5. The neurotic need to exploit others. Neurotics frequently evaluate others on

the basis of how they can be used or exploited, but at the same time, they fear
being exploited by others.

6. The neurotic need for social recognition or prestige. Some people combat
basic anxiety by trying to be first, to be important, or to attract attention to
themselves.

7. The neurotic need for personal admiration. Neurotics have a need to be

admired for what they are rather than for what they possess. Their inflated self-
esteem must be continually fed by the admiration and approval of others.

8. The neurotic need for ambition and personal achievement. Neurotics often
have a strong drive to be the best—the best salesperson, the best bowler, the
best lover. They must defeat other people in order to confirm their superiority.

9. The neurotic need for self-sufficiency and independence. Many neurotics have
a strong need to move away from people, thereby proving that they can get
along without others. The playboy who cannot be tied down by any woman
exemplifies this neurotic need.

10. The neurotic need for perfection and unassailability. By striving relentlessly
for perfection, neurotics receive “proof” of their self-esteem and personal
superiority. They dread making mistakes and having personal flaws, and they
desperately attempt to hide their weaknesses from others.

3. 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.
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Neurotic trends:

As her theory evolved, Horney began to see that the list of 10 neurotic needs
could be grouped into three general categories, each relating to a person’s basic
attitude toward self and others. In 1945, she identified the three basic attitudes,
or we can call it as neurotic trends, as (1) moving against people(aggressive
personality), (2) moving toward people (compliant personality), and (3) moving
away from people (detached personality)

Aggressive personality :

Affection and approval and adominant partner comes under this personality

aggressive personalities never display fear of rejection

they judge everyone in terms of the benefit they will receive from the
relationship

compliant personality:

The compliant personality displays attitudes and behaviors that reflect a desire
to move toward other people

Compliant personalities display needs toward everyone, although they usually

have a need for one dominant person, such as a friend or spouse, who will take
charge of their lives and offer protection and guidance

Compliant personalities manipulate other people, particularly their partners, to

achieve their goals

Consequently, they regard other people as superior, and even in situations in

which they are competent or skilful , they see themselves as inferior.

Detached personality:

In order to solve the basic conflict of isolation, some people behave in a

detached manner and adopt a neurotic trend of moving away from people.

They suppress all feelings toward other people, particularly feelings of love and
hate
Detached personalities have an almost desperate desire for privacy. They need
to be alone

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✓ In the neurotic person, one of these three trends is dominant, whereas

the other two are present to a lesser degree.
✓ The difference between the normal person and the neurotic person lies
in the intensity of the conflict; it is much more intense in the neurotic.
✓ Normal person express all 3 trends.

Thankyou… next slide will be continued by abinash