Lesson 6

• Karen Horney's psychoanalytic social theory emphasizes that social and cultural experiences, especially during childhood, shape one's personality.
• Karen Horney's writings are mostly concerned with the neurotic personality, but many of her ideas can be applied to normal individuals.
• Karen Horney's life experiences shaped her perspectives on personality, and her insights were gained through her efforts to alleviate her pain and that of her patients.
• Karen Horney was born on September 15, 1885, in Eilbek, Germany, to Berndt Danielsen, a sea captain, and Clothilda Danielsen.
• Karen Horney's family dynamics were unhappy due to discord with older half-siblings and father.
• Karen Horney's feelings towards her father were hostile, while she idolized her supportive mother.
• Karen Horney resented her favored older brother and was concerned about parental discord.
• Horney's 10 Categories of Neurotic Needs include the neurotic need for affection and approval, the need for a powerful partner, the need to restrict one's life within narrow borders, the need for power, the need to exploit others, the need for social recognition or prestige, the need for personal admiration, the need for ambition and personal achievement, the need for self-sufficiency and independence, and the need for perfection and unassailability.
• Horney's neurotic trends apply to normal individuals.
• Normal people are mostly or completely conscious of their strategies toward other people, neurotics are unaware of their basic attitude.
• There are important differences between normal and neurotic attitudes.
• Normals are free to choose their actions, neurotics are forced to act.
• Horney's theory of neurosis identifies three general categories of neurotic needs: moving toward people, moving against people, and moving away from people.
• At 13, Karen Horney aspired to be a physician, but German universities initially did not accept women.
• Karen Horney enrolled at the University of Freiburg, becoming one of Germany's first female medicine students.
• Karen Horney crossed paths with Oskar Horney, a political science student, leading to a friendship-turned-romantic relationship.
• Karen Horney married Oskar Horney and resided in Berlin, where Oskar, holding a PhD, worked for a coal company, while Karen, not yet an MD, focused on psychiatry.
• Karen Horney's parents separated and both died within less than a year of each other, and she gave birth to three daughters in 5 years.
• Karen Horney engaged in Freudian psychoanalysis, analyzed by Karl Abraham, a close associate of Freud.
• In healthy children, these three drives are not necessarily incompatible.
• Neurotics who adopt the philosophy of moving toward people are likely to see themselves as loving, generous, unselfish, humble, and sensitive to other people’s feelings.
• Some children move toward people by behaving in a compliant manner as a protection against feelings of helplessness.
• Horney (1950) used the term basic conflict because very young children are driven in all three directions— toward, against, and away from people.
• Normals can choose from a variety of strategies, neurotics are limited to a single trend.
• The neurotic trend of moving toward people involves a complex of strategies, including the need to be powerful to exploit others to receive recognition and prestige to be admired to achieve.
• In the United States, the striving for these goals is usually viewed with admiration, and compulsively aggressive people frequently come out on top in many endeavors valued by American society.
• They are willing to subordinate themselves to others, to see others as more intelligent or attractive, and to rate themselves according to what others think of them.
• Experiencing basically contradictory attitudes toward others, these children attempt to solve this basic conflict by making one of the three neurotic trends consistently dominant.
• Horney’s conception of the mutual influence of basic hostility and basic anxiety as well as both normal and neurotic defenses against anxiety.
• People can use each of the neurotic trends to solve basic conflict, but these solutions are essentially nonproductive or neurotic.
• Still other children move away from people by adopting a detached manner, thus alleviating feelings of isolation.
• Aggressive people play to win rather than for the enjoyment of the contest, and they may appear to be hard working and resourceful on the job, but their basic motivation is for power, prestige, and personal ambition.
• Normals experience mild conflict, neurotics experience severe and insoluble conflict.
• Other children move against people with acts of aggression in order to circumvent the hostility of others.
• Karen Horney achieved MD degree, after five years of psychoanalysis.
• Horney's list of defenses against basic anxiety includes Affection, a strategy that does not always lead to authentic love.
• The 10 categories of neurotic needs overlap one another, and a single person might employ more than one.
• Horney tentatively identified 10 categories of neurotic needs that characterize neurotics in their attempts to combat basic anxiety.
• Basic hostility and basic anxiety are "inextricably interwoven".
• Horney (1950) termed the condition of basic anxiety as "a feeling of being isolated and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile".