Karen Horney - Chapter 5

The life or Horney

• felt rejected by her parents

  • became ambitious and rebellious

• Became successful in her career as a doctor

• found psychoanalytic association

Childhood Need for Safety and Security

• Safety Need

• Repressing Hostility toward parents

Safety Need

• The importance of the early years of childhood in shaping the adult personality

• Safety need - a high level need for security and freedom from fear

• Ways in which parents undermine a child’s security

  • obvious punishment

  • breaking promises

Repressing Hostility Toward Parents

• Punishments

  • Children can easily be made to feel fearful of their parents

• love

  • fear of losing even unsatisfactory expressions of love

• Guilt

  • The more guilt a child feels, the more deeply repressed will be the hostility

Two components of Basic Anxiety: The Foundation of Neurosis

• Basic Anxiety

• Self-protective mechanisms against anxiety

Basic Anxiety

• Pervasive feeling of loneliness and helplessness

• foundation of neurosis

• self-protective mechanisms

  • motivate a person to seek security and reassurance

  • are powerful and intense

Self-protective mechanisms against anxiety

• securing affection

  • if you love me, you will not hurt me

• Being submissive

  • complying with the wishes of others

• Attaining Power

  • by attaining power, a person can compensate for helplessness

• Withdrawing

  • Become independent of others

Neurotic Needs and Trends

• Neurotic Needs ( came 1st)

  • irrational defenses that become a permanenet part of personality

• Neurotic trends ( came 2nd)

  • a revision of neurotic needs

  • categories of behaviors and attitudes toward oneself and others that express a person

Movement toward other people ( the compliance personality)

• Affection and approval

• a dominant partner

Movement against other people ( the aggressive personality)

• power

• exploitation

• pretige

• admiraton

• achievement

Movement away from other people ( the detached personality)

• self-sufficiency

• perfection

• narrow limits to life

Conflict

• basic incompatibility of the neurotic trends

  • core of neurosis

• A person experiencing neurosis has one dominant trend

  • intense battles to keep the nondominant trends from being expressed

Neurotic Competitiveness

• An indiscriminate need to win at all costs

• Different types of compettivness

  • Hypercompative ( HCO)

  • Self-developmental competitve orientation ( SDCO)

  • Anxiety-driven competition avoidance ( ADCA)

  • Lack of interets toward competition ( LIC)

Idealized Self-image

• idealized picture of oneself

• unifies personality

• self-image of a normal person

  • built on flexible, realistic assessment of one’s abilities

• Neurotic self -image

  • based on an inflexible and unrealist self-appraisal

  • unsatisfactory substitute for self worth

• Tyranny of the Soulds

  • an attempt to realize an unattainable idealized self-image

  • Involves denial of the true self and behaving in terms of what one thinks they should be doing

• Extermination

  • Ways of defending against conflict caused by the discrepancy between an idealized and a real self-image

  • projects conflict onto the outside world

Feminine Psychology

• Male evny toward women due to their capacity for motherhood

• feelings of inferiority lead women to deny their feminity

• Horney, argued that women must seek their identity by developing their abilities and pursuing careers

Karen Horney

• More optimistic than Freud

• Free will - we can all shape our lives and achieve self-realization

• highlighted the influence of nurture

• focused on the past and the present

• emphasized uniqueness

• believed in growth and flexibility

• noted our ability to help resolve our own problems

Types of Assessment

• Free association

• dream analysis

• Compliant, Aggressive, and Detached Personality ( CAD)

• Horney-Coolidge Type indicator ( HCTI)

Free Association

• Focus is on the visible emotional reactions of the patient toward the therapist

• She believed people could hide aspects of their inner selves and falsify memories and feelings about events they experienced. She focused on visible actions

Dream Analysis

• Reveals a person’s true self, and the focus is on the emotional content of the dream

• Dreams help us to attempt to problem solve either in constructive or neurotic ways. Help to show us our true attitudes may differ from what our self-image is.

Compliant, Aggressive, and Detached Personality (CAD)

• 35 - item self-report inventory that measures the neurotic trends

Horney-Coolidge Type Indicator ( HCTI)

57 - item self-report inventory that measures the neurotic trends

Contributions

• Theory has a commonsense appeal and is easily understood

• relevant to current American culture

• Neurotic trends are seen as a valuable way to categorize deviant behavior

• Had a significant impact on the personality theories of Erik Erikson and Abraham Maslow

Criticism

• Received a great deal of criticism from those who continued to adhere to Freud’s position

• Denied the role of biological influences

• reduced emphasis on sexuality and the unconscious

• incomplete and inconsistent theory

• heavy influenced by the middle-class american culture

• primarily due to the women’s movement that began in the 1960s, Horney’s book attracted attention.