Karen Horney's Psychoanalytic Theories

• Karen Horney was a prominent figure in psychoanalysis
• She emphasized the role of culture and feminism in understanding personality

Theory

• Karen Horney focused on the theory of neurosis and feminine psychology

Biographical Information

• Karen Horney lived from 1885 to 1952

Family background

• Horney was born in Germany
• Her father was strict and religious
• Her mother was spirited and freethinking
• Horney felt rejected by her parents and envied her brother for being male

Search for Love and Career

• In Horney's life she searched for love vs. career resulting in depression in adulthood
• She had a relationship with Erich Fromm
• Horney began Freudian psychoanalysis
• She turned to self-analysis
• Horney founded psychoanalytic associations

Hostility and Rebellion

• During her life, Horney acted the part of the adoring, obedient model child and later became ambitious and rebellious
• She felt unattractive and inadequate, leading to feelings of revenge
• As an adult, she realized how much hostility she had,
• Horney mentioned that a lack of love fosters anxiety and hostility: "If I couldn't be beautiful, I decided I would be smart."
• In all her psychoanalytic writings Horney tried to make sense of herself and obtain relief from her own difficulties
• She met her husband, and later married him after meeting at the University of Berlin, while one of few women in medical school

Key events in her search for love

• Crush on teacher at 14, awakened to the reality of sex at 17
• Horney soon met a man, describing as her first real love, lasting two days
• 76 pages of soul-searching in her diary about another man
• Being in love eliminated her anxiety and insecurity
• This quest for love and security was often thwarted during this time
• Determined at age 12 to become a doctor
• Horney faced discrimination and oppostiion
• Horney entered the University of Freiburg medical school in 1906
• She was only the second woman admitted, only six years after the first woman had
• At medical school met 2 men
• Fell in love with one and married the other, Oskar Horney (doing PhD in pol.sci)
• 1913, she earned her degree from U. of Berlin

Psychoanalysis

• In psychoanalysis with Karl Abraham (a Freudian loyalist) Horney experienced attraction to forceful men
• Analysis was not a success, she preferred self-analysis
• Self-analysis was strongly influenced by Adler

Compensation

• Horney compensated for inferiority feelings
• Her belief was that by studying medicine and by promiscuous sexual behavior, she was acting more like a man (masculine protest Adler)

Childhood Safety Needs

• Feeling a need for security and freedom from fear
• Infant helplessness can lead to repression of hostility
• Arises from parental behaviors like lack of warmth & affection, and guilt

Basic Anxiety

• Pervasive feeling of loneliness & helplessness, a foundation of neurosis
• Self-Protective Mechanisms include; securing affection & love, being submissive, attaining power, and withdrawing

Neurotic Needs and Trends

• Defense attitudes that become exaggerated, or inappropriate strivings
• Neurotic Needs include; overused self-protective mechanisms, and ten irrational defenses against anxiety
• Neurotic Trends are the expression of needs
• Categories of behavior & attitudes include; coping strategies or primary modes of relating

Core concepts

• Basic Anxiety: a child's fear of being alone
• The Real Self: inner core of personality that is perceived about oneself

Needs

• Includes items related to affection & approval, dominant partner, power, exploitation, prestige, admiration, achievement, self-sufficiency, perfection, and narrow limits to life

Neurotic Trends

• Movement Toward People (Compliant Personality)
• Movement Against People (Aggressive Personality)
• Movement Away from People (Detached Personality)

Compliant Personality

• Includes a moving toward people mentality that suppress own desires and fears rejection
• This coping strategy leads to a self-effacing orientation towards life, excessive appeal to be loved

Example Coping Strategy

• A person raised by alcoholic parents may have learned to obtain self-esteem by conforming to exploitative demands
• As adults they may seek out exploitive partners and devote themselves to attempting to make the partner happy and thereby win their approval

Aggressive Personality

• Moving against people, desire to maintain superiority & power, driven by insecurity, anxiety, & hostility
• Highly successful in work
• This coping strategy leads a self-expansive orientation towards life (excessive attempt at mastery)

Detached Personality

• Includes Moving away from people to maintain emotional distance & privacy, and a sense of superiority
• These individuals suppress feelings toward others
• This coping strategy leads a resigning orientation towards life (excessive desire to be free of others)

Neurotic Needs

• Based on things we all need, but have become distorted in several ways by the difficulties of some people's lives

List of Needs

• Constantly seeking to please others reflects a need for Affection and Approval
• Excessive dependence reflects a need for A domineering partner
• A need for Power = the Need for controlling others and despising weakness
• Fear of being exploited but not of exploiting = Exploitation
• A need for Recognition and Prestige is Seeking ever higher status
• Seeking compliments, even if undeserved = Admiration
• Ambition and Achievement = Wanting to be the best, as a result of inner security
• Self-Sufficiency = Never committing to others
• A Need for attempting to be flawless = Perfection
• Being content with having little and thus submitting to others means Narrow Limits

#1 - Neurotic Need - Affection and approval

• An indiscriminate need to please others and be liked by them

#2 - Neurotic Need - Partner

• Need of someone who will take over ones life
• Includes idea that love will solve all of one's problems
• A desire most share, but neurotics take a step or too far

#3 - Neurotic Need - Narrow Borders

• Restrict ones life is to narrow borders
• A need to be undemanding
• To be satisfied with little
• To be inconspicuous

#4 - Neurotic Need - Power

• Control over others with a façade of omnipotence
• People seek strength, but the neurotic may be desperate for it
• A need for dominance for its own sake, often accompanied by a contempt for the weak and a strong belief in ones own rational powers

#5 - Neurotic Need - Exploit

• The Need to exploit others to get the better of them
• For the ordinary person, this might be the need to have an effect, to have impact, to be heard
• For the neurotic, it can become manipulation and the belief that people are there to be used
• May also involve a fear of being used, of looking stupid

#6 - Neurotic Need - Social recognition or prestige

• Concern with appearances and popularity
• Fear of being ignored, be thought plain, "uncool," or "out of it."

#7 - Neurotic Need - Personal admiration

• The Need to be admired for inner qualities as well as outer ones
• Valuing the need to feel important
• Needing to remind everyone of their importance
• fearing of being thought nobodies, unimportant and meaningless

#8 - Neurotic Need - Personal Achievement

• the Need to be number one at everything one participates
• People devaluing anything they cannot be number one in

#9 - Neurotic Need - Self-sufficiency and independence

• The need to cultivate some autonomy
• Some people feel that they shouldn't ever need anybody
• Tend to refuse help and are often reluctant to commit to a relationship

#10 - Neurotic Need - perfection and unassailability

• The need to become better and better at life
• People are driven to be perfect and scared of being flawed
• People are never in control if they making a mistake

The Tyranny of the Shoulds

• Horney described the stretching between the despised and ideal selves as "the tyranny of the shoulds" and neurotic "striving for glory"
• The compliant person believes "I should be sweet, self-sacrificing, saintly."
• The aggressive person says "I should be powerful, recognized, a winner."
• The withdrawing person believes "I should be independent, aloof, perfect."
• The neurotic is alienated from their true core and prevented from actualizing their potentials by vacillating between two impossible selves

Neurotic Needs and Trends - Conflict

• When the trends are incompatible
• It becomes part of core of neurosis
• Within a neurotic person, one of the three trends is dominant
• The presence of other needs in conflict & go unmet

Selves

• There are three 'selves', the:
  • Passive
  • Aggressive
  • Withdrawn

Idealized Self-Image

• Is an idealized picture of oneself that unifies personality

Characteristics of a Healthy self

• Realistic appraisal of abilities
• Flexible and dynamic
• Reflects growth & self awareness

Characteristics of a Neurotic self

• Unattainable & inflexible ideal
• Leads to denial of self
• Behaving how one thinks they should (Tyranny of the Shoulds)
• Projecting conflicts on outside world (Externalization)

The Self (diagram)

• Has a concept of perfection (Ideal Self)
• Which we mold based on the way we view our perceived inadequacies
• And the resulting helplessness

Feminine Psychology

• Began in 1922 in opposition to Freud
• Revising psychoanalysis to encompass womanhood & women's roles

Feminine Psychology concepts

• Not sexual (Oedipus complex)
• Represents conflict between dependence & hostility (Oedipus complex)
• Denial of femininity (Flight from Womanhood)
• Women's unconscious wish to be men (Flight from Womanhood)
• Envy men feel toward women due to her capacity for motherhood (Womb Envy)
• Social & cultural conflict (Motherhood or Career)

Rejection of Penis Envy

• Karen Horney modified Freudian techniques
• Not completely against Freud
• Asking what kind of environment do women live in and what kind of messages they receive?
• Believed that a Self-fulfilling prophecy is not surprising

Penis Envy Rejection

• Both Freud and Horney observed inferiority feelings
• Freud pointed to the anatomy
• Horney highlights the environment
• Horney mentions Overemphasis on securing the love of a man
• And the P Envy but without the penis
• What about Womb envy?

Some men are envious of a woman's ability to bear children

• Compensation for their inability to more directly extend themselves into the future by means of carrying, bearing, and nurturing their children?
• May effect the degree they are driven to succeed and to have their names live on after them.

Basic Anxiety Definition

• "insidiously increasing, all-pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile world"

Basic Anxiety

• A Childs fear of being alone
• Tied to feelings of hostility helplessness, and fear.
• In Horney's words, it produces feeling “small, insignificant, helpless, deserted, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray" (1937, p. 92)
• Children must repress their hostility
• Basic anxiety (replaces Freud's emphasis on biological drives and a Horney emphasis on social)

Roots of anxiety

• Children develop feelings of security when parents show
  • Comfort
  • Warmth
  • Affection
• Lack of warmth, stability, respect, or involvement? (Poor parenting)
• Basic Anxiety (universal): a child's fear of being alone, helpless, and insecure.

Actions against basic anxiety

• In childhood by securing affection and love
• Being submissive
• Attaining power
• Withdrawing

Source of Powerlessness in Childhood

• Inability to go out into the world and claim their rightful place
• This powerlessness leads to needing to repress hostility and toward the powerful adults to seek their means when they need to be met

Factors Causing Unhealthy Relations,

• Lack of warmth and Stability
• Lack of Respect, and Involvement

Directed Anxiety

• Can be directed at everyone eventually, when the internal turmoil becomes focused outward, on the world in general
• Interpsychic vs. Intrapsychic
• Childhood motives arise from social conflicts within the family and larger conflicts within the society

4 Protective Mechanisms

• Goals: Get love, submit, get power, and withdraw.
• For Goal to protect against basic anxiety, NOT to pursue happiness or pleasure, Hence causes impairment to growth of personality
• Means to reduce anxiety: sex or other physiological functions leads to impoverished personality

Neurotic Coping Strategies

• Overidentification with ideal self PUTS YOU AT RISK for MISERY
• The Narcissistic (selfish and with excessive self-regard)
• heavily praised?
• told you could do anything?
• succeed at everything?
  • This could lead to becoming a selfish person with excessive self-regard
    • And that leads to anxiety, depression and misery
    • There is a difference between confidence and narcissism

Theory of Neurosis - Points

• It attempts to make life more bearable (given the challenges we face in it)
• To provide "interpersonal control and coping" (healthy or unhealthy)
• Although neurotic attempts may lead to one "sinking fast"
• It serves as the best theory of neurosis to date
• Serves as the foundation for the cognitive approach to treating anxiety and mood disorders (depression)
• Exhibits continuity with normal life than previous theorists suggest

Trends

• Includes points on Aggression, and Withdrawal

Aggression

• Moving against strategy (expansive solution) striving for power initiates conflicts with others

Withdrawal

• Moving-away-from strategy - resigning solution results on withdrawal of emotion

Children need security

• Is achieved when they develop feelings of comfort, warmth and are provide with affection

Self Concepts

• Includes points on the Real self , with the aim to
  • Represents what we are; those things that are true about us
• The Ideal self is what we think we should be and is used as a model to assist us in developing our potential and achieving self-actualization (results in Alienation and Tyranny of the should)

Explore Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories, focusing on her divergence from Freudian psychoanalysis. This includes her emphasis on cultural and social factors, neurotic needs, and basic anxiety. Understand Horney's perspective on childhood experiences and self-analysis.