Karen Horney's social psychological models

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

SIGNIFICANCE: Karen Horney’s social psychoanalytic theory focuses on how human relationships and cultural conditions influence personality formation; the theory describes how basic anxiety, resulting from childhood experiences, contributes to the development of three neurotic, compulsive, rigid personality styles: moving toward others, moving away from others, and moving against others. Normal personality is characterized by flexibility and balance among interpersonal styles.

Introduction

Karen Horney (1885-1952) spent the major part of her career explaining how personality patterns, especially neurotic patterns, are formed, how they operate, and how they can be changed to increase individual potential. In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s view that people are guided by instincts and the pleasure principle, Horney proposed that people act out desires to achieve safety and satisfaction in social relationships. She was optimistic about the possibility of human growth and believed that, under conditions of acceptance and care, people move toward self-realization or the development of their full potential. She wrote almost exclusively, however, about personality problems and methods for solving them.

Role of Culture

Horney believed that it is impossible to understand individuals or the mechanisms of neurosis, described as inflexible behaviors and reactions, or discrepancies between one’s potential and one’s achievements, apart from the cultural context in which they exist. Neurosis varies across cultures, as well as within the same culture, and is influenced by socioeconomic class, gender, and historical period. For example, in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), Horney noted that a person who refused to accept a salary increase in a Western culture might be seen as neurotic, whereas in a Pueblo Indian culture, this person might be seen as entirely normal.

The neurotic person experiences culturally determined problems in an exaggerated form. In Western culture, competitiveness shapes many neurotic problems because it decreases opportunities for cooperation, fosters a climate of mistrust and hostility, undermines self-esteem, increases isolation, and encourages people to be more concerned with how they appear to others than with fulfilling personal possibilities. It fosters the overvaluing of external success, encourages people to develop grandiose images of superiority, and leads to intensified needs for approval and affection as well as the distortion of love. Moreover, the ideal of external success is contradicted by the ideal of humility, which leads to further internal conflict and, in many cases, neurosis.

Role of the Family

Cultural patterns are replicated and transmitted primarily in family environments. Ideally, a family provides the warmth and nurturance that prepares children to face the world with confidence. When parents struggle unsuccessfully with the culture, however, they create conditions that lead to inadequate parenting. In its most extreme form, the competitiveness of the larger culture leads to child abuse, but it can also lead to parents’ preoccupation with their own needs, an inability to love and nurture effectively, or a tendency to treat children as extensions of themselves. Rivalry, overprotectiveness, irritability, partiality, and erratic behavior are other manifestations of parental problems.

Within this negative environment, children experience fear and anger, but they also feel weak and helpless beside more powerful adults. They recognize that expressing hostility directly might be dangerous and result in parental reprisals or loss of love. As a result, children repress legitimate anger, banishing it to the unconscious. By using the defense mechanism of reaction formation, they develop emotions toward parents that are the opposite of anger, and they experience feared parents as objects of admiration. Children unconsciously turn their inner fears and anger against themselves and lose touch with their real selves. As a result, they develop basic anxiety or the feeling of being alone and defenseless in a world that seems hostile.

Defense and Coping Strategies

To cope with basic anxiety, individuals use additional defensive strategies or neurotic trends to cope with the world. These involve three primary patterns of behaviormoving away from others, moving toward others, and moving against others. In addition, neurotic individuals develop an idealized self, an unrealistic, flattering distortion of the self-image that encourages people to set unattainable standards, shrink from reality, and compulsively search for glory (compulsive and insatiable efforts to fulfill the demands of the idealized self) rather than accept themselves as they are.

Horney wrote about these in rich detail in Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (1945), Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-realization (1950), and Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (1945). The person who moves toward others believes: “If I love you or give in, you will not hurt me.” The person who moves against others believes: “If I have power, you will not hurt me.” The person who moves away from others thinks: “If I am independent or withdraw from you, you will not hurt me.”

The person who moves toward others has chosen a dependent or compliant coping pattern. The person experiences strong needs for approval, belonging, and affection and strives to live up to the expectations of others through behavior that is over-considerate and submissive. This person sees love as the only worthwhile goal in life and represses all competitive, hostile, angry aspects of the self. The moving-against type, who has adopted an aggressive, tough, exploitative style, believes that others are hostile, that life is a struggle, and that the only way to survive is to win and control others. This person sees themself as strong and determined and represses all feelings of affection for fear of losing power over others. Finally, the moving-away type, who has adopted a style of detachment and isolation, sees themself as self-sufficient, private, and superior to others. This person represses all emotion and avoids any desire or activity that would result in dependency on others.

The interpersonal patterns that Horney discussed are no longer known as neurotic styles but as personality disorders. Many of the behaviors that she described are also described in various diagnostic categories in the American Psychiatric Association’s 2022 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), such as dependent personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Like Horney’s original criteria, these categories describe inflexible and maladaptive patterns of behavior and thinking that are displayed in various environments and result in emotional distress or impaired functioning.

Use of Psychoanalysis

In her practice of psychoanalysis, Horney used free association and dream analysis to bring unconscious material to light. In contrast to Freud’s more passive involvement with patients, she believed that the psychoanalyst should play an active role in interpreting behavior and inquiring about current behaviors that maintain unproductive patterns, suggesting alternatives, and helping people mobilize energy to change.

Horney also made psychoanalysis more accessible to the general population. She suggested that, by examining themselves according to the principles outlined in her book Self-Analysis (1942), people could increase self-understanding and gain freedom from internal issues that limit their potential. Her suggestions indicate that people should choose a problem that they could clearly identify, engage in informal free association about the issue, reflect on and tentatively interpret the experience, and make specific, simple choices about altering problematic behavior patterns. Complex, long-standing issues, however, should be dealt with in formal psychoanalysis.

Influences

Horney was one of the first individuals to criticize Freud’s psychology of women. In contrast to Freudian instinct theory, she proposed a version of psychoanalysis that emphasized the role that social relationships and culture play in human development. She questioned the usefulness of Freud’s division of the personality into the regions of the id, ego, and and viewed the as a more constructive, forward-moving force within the person.

Horney’s work was enriched by her contact with psychoanalysts Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, and Erich Fromm, who also emphasized the role of interpersonal relationships and sociocultural factors and were members of Horney’s American Institute of Psychoanalysis when it was first established. Horney’s work also resembled Alfred Adler’s personality theory. Her concepts of the search for glory and idealized self are similar to Adler’s concepts of superiority striving and the superiority complex. Furthermore, Adler’s ruling type resembles the moving-against personality, his getting type is similar to the moving-toward personality, and his avoiding type is closely related to the moving-away personality.

Contributions to the Field

Horney anticipated many later developments within cognitive, humanistic, and feminist personality theory and psychotherapy. Her work inspired Abraham Maslow, who built his concept of self-actualization on Horney’s optimistic belief that individuals can move toward self-realization. Carl R. Rogers’s assumptions that problems are based on distortions of real experience and discrepancies between the ideal and real selves are related to Horney’s beliefs that unhealthy behavior results from denial of the real self and conflict between the idealized and real selves. In the field of cognitive psychotherapy, Albert Ellis’s descriptions of the mechanisms of neurosis resemble Horney’s statements. He borrowed the phrase “tyranny of the should” from Horney and strongly emphasized how “shoulds” influence irrational, distorted thinking patterns.

Horney’s notion that cultural patterns shape problems is echoed in the work of feminist psychotherapists, who believe that individual problems are often the consequence of external social problems. Following Horney’s death, fourteen of her works concerning female psychosexual development written between 1922 and 1937 were published in 1967 in Feminine Psychology.

Bibliography

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