Personality Theories in Psychology: Karen Horney

Karen Horney was one of the most famous psychoanalysts in her epic. Born in Germany in 1885, she is considered one of the representatives of the Neo-Freudian movement. This is defined by challenging the initial psychoanalysis while maintaining the foundations of dynamic psychology. Horney is also known for being a woman activist, she fought for the rights of women from the field of knowledge of her developing a psychological theory adapted to women.

If you want to know more about the life and work of a pioneer in the Personality theories in psychology: Karen Horney, We invite you to continue reading this Psychology-Online article.

Index

1. Karen Horney Biography: Early Years
2. Karen Horney: biography of her adulthood
3. Karen Horney's Theory of Personality
4. The 10 neurotic needs according to Horney
5. Karen Horney: Theory and Development
6. Theory of the self
7. Karen Horney's Personality Theory Discussion
8. Criticisms and limitations of Horney's theory
9. Karen Horney: Books

Karen Horney was born on September 16, 1885, to Clotilde and Brendt Wackels Danielson. Her father was a naval captain and was a very religious and authoritarian man. Her children called him "the Bible thrower" because, according to Horney, she really did. Her mother, nicknamed Sonni, was a very different person. She was Berndt's second wife, 19 years younger and considerably more urban. Karen herself also had an older brother named Berndt whom she cared deeply for, as well as 4 other older siblings from her father's first marriage.

Karen Horney's childhood seems to be full of contradictions: for example, while Karen describes her father as a subject disciplinary that she preferred her brother Berndt over the others, on the other hand she apparently brought multiple gifts to Karen from all over the world and even took him on three overseas voyages, which was quite difficult for a captain in those time. However, she felt a lack of affection on the part of her father, which caused her to bow especially to her mother, turning, as she herself has said, "her little lamb" from her.

At the age of 9, she changed her approach to her life, becoming ambitious and even rebellious. She said to herself: "If I can't be pretty, then I'll decide to be smart". Also, around this stage, her Karen developed a strange attraction for her own brother. Embarrassed by her expectations of him, as anyone would imagine from a teenage boy, he pushed her away from him. This situation led him to what would be his first encounter with depression, a problem that would not leave him for the rest of his life.

In early adulthood a few years of stress ensued. In 1904, his mother divorced her parents, leaving him with Karen and young Berndt. In 1906 he entered the medical school against the wishes of his parents and in fact, against the opinion of the polite society of his time. While there she met a law student named Oscar Horney, whom she would marry in 1909. A year later, Karen gave birth to Brigitte, the first of her three daughters. In 1911, her mother Sonni died, causing significant stress on Karen, which led to her psychoanalysis.

Just like Sigmund Freud I would have guessed, Karen had married a man no different from her father: Oscar was as authoritarian as the captain had been with his children. Horney realized that not only did she not intervene, but she even understood that this atmosphere was good for her children and that it would instill in them a desire for independence. It was only many years later that through his introspection she would change his vision of parenting.

In 1923, Oscar's business collapsed. Oscar then developed meningitis, becoming a ruinous, delinquent and argumentative man. In this same year, Karen's brother dies at the age of 40 as a result of a lung infection. Karen sank into a great depression, to the point of swimming out to sea while she was on vacation with the idea of ​​taking her own life.

Karen and her daughters moved out of Oscar's home in 1926 and immigrated to the United States four years later. They settled in Brooklyn. Oddly enough these days, in the 1930s Brooklyn was the intellectual capital of the world, largely due to the influence of Jewish refugees from Germany. It was here that she became friends with intellectuals of the stature of Erich fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, getting to have a sporadic relationship with the latter. And it was here that she would develop her personality theories of neurosis, based on her experience as a psychotherapist.

He continued to attend, teach, and write until his death in 1952.

Karen Horney's theories of personality in psychology are perhaps the best theories about neuroses what we have.

In the first place, she offered a quite different perspective on understanding neurosis, regarding it as something much more continuous in normal life than previous theorists. Specifically, she understood neurosis as an attempt to make life more bearable, as a form of "interpersonal control and adaptation". This would, of course, be what we are addressing in our daily lives, only that it seems most of us do well and neurotics seem to sink further quickly.

In his clinical experience, he distinguished 10 particular patterns of neurotic needs, which are based on those things that we all need, but which have become distorted in various ways by the difficulties of some people's lives.

Theory of neurosis: the psychoanalysis of Karen Horney

Let's take the first necessity as an example; the need for affection and approval: We all need affection, so what makes this need neurotic? First, the need is unreal, irrational, indiscriminate. For example, we all need affection, but we don't expect it from everyone we meet. We don't expect large doses of affection from even our best friends and relationships. We don't expect our partners to give us affection all the time, in all circumstances. We do not expect great displays of love while our partners are filling out the forms of payments to the Treasury, for example. And, we are aware that there will be many times in our life where we will have to be self-sufficient.

Second, the neurotic need is much more intense and will cause a great deal of anxiety if its demand is not satisfied or even if it is perceived that it will not be satisfied in the future. It is this, therefore, that leads him to have that unreal nature. Affection, to continue the same example, must be clearly expressed at all times, in all circumstances, by all people, or panic will set in. The neurotic has made necessity the central part of his existence.

According to Karen Horney's theory of personality in psychology, neurotic needs are as follows:

• Neurotic need for affection and approval: Indiscriminate need to please others and be loved by them.
• Neurotic partner need: of someone who takes the reins of our life. This need includes the idea that love will solve all our problems. Again, we would all like to have a partner to share our lives with, but the neurotic goes a step or two further.
• The neurotic needs to restrict life from one to very narrow limits, to not being demanding, to satisfying ourselves with very little. Even this posture has its normal counterpart. Who has not felt the need to simplify life when it becomes very stressful; to join a monastic order; to disappear from the routine; or to return to the mother's womb?
• Neurotic need for power: of control over others, of omnipotence. We all seek power, but the neurotic despairs of achieving it. It is a mastery of his own deed, usually accompanied by a rejection of weakness and a strong belief in one's own rational powers.
• Neurotic urge to explode: to others and make the best of them. In the common person we could understand this as the need to have an effect, to cause an impact, to be heard. In the neurotic, it becomes manipulation and the belief that others are there to be used. She may also understand an idea of ​​fear of being manipulated by others, of looking stupid. You may have noticed those people who love practical jokes, but cannot stand it when they are the butt of such jokes, right?
• Neurotic need for recognition or social prestige: We are social as well as sexual creatures, and we like to be appreciated by others. But these people are over-concerned about appearances and popularity. They fear being ignored, plain, uncool, and "out of place."
• Need for personal admiration: We all need to be admired for our qualities both internal and external. We need to feel important and valued. But some people are more desperate and need to remind us of the importance of it ("no one recognizes geniuses"; "I'm the real architect behind the scenes, you know," and so on. His fear centers on being nobody, unimportant and meaningless in his actions.
• Neurotic need for personal achievement: Once again we will say that there is nothing wrong with aspiring to achievements, far from it. But some people are obsessed with it. They must be number one in everything and since this is, of course, a very difficult task, we see these people constantly devaluing what they cannot be first at. If, for example, they are good runners, discus throwing and weights are "secondary sports." If her strength is academics, physical abilities are not important, and so on.
• Neurotic need for self-reliance and independence: All of us must cultivate a certain autonomy, but some people feel that they should never need anyone. They tend to reject help and are often reluctant to commit to a loving relationship.
• Need for perfection and impregnability: Many times to be better and better in our life, we have an impulse that can in fact be neurotic consideration, but some people constantly pretend to be perfect and fear fail. They do not resist being "caught" in a mistake and therefore need to control all the time.

As Horney reviewed his concepts, he began to realize that his types of neurotic needs could be grouped into three broad adaptation strategies:

• Compliance (compliance), which includes needs 1, 2 and 3.
• Aggression, including needs from 4 to 8.
• Remoteness, including needs 9, 10 and 3. The latter was added because it is crucial to achieve the illusion of independence and total perfection.

In her writing, the author used other phrases to refer to these three strategies. In addition to compliance, she referred to it as the move-into strategy and the so-called self-withdrawal. We just have to pause a bit to see that these phrases are very similar in content to Adler's phlegmatic personality or learning approach.

The second point (The agression) was also called as moving against or as the expansive solution. She would correspond to the same thing that Adler described with her dominant type or the so-called anger personality.

And finally, in addition to distancing, the third need was also called as walk away from the solution or resignation. It is very similar to avoidant type of adler or the melancholic personality.

It is true that some people who were victims of abuse and neglect in childhood suffer from neurosis in their adult life. What we almost always forget is that most do not. If you have a violent father or schizophrenic mother, or have been sexually abused by an uncle, you may still have other family members who loved you very much, took great care of you, and worked to protect you from potential others damage; and you could have grown up healthy and happy as an adult. It is even more true that most adult neurotics do not in fact suffer from child abuse or rejection, therefore The following question arises: if rejection or child abuse are the causes of neuroses, then what is the produces?.

Horney's answer is the call paternal indifference or as she called him "the basic evil" or a lack of warmth and affection during childhood. Know that even an occasional spanking or childhood sexual encounter can be overcome, as long as the child feels accepted and loved.

The key to understanding parental indifference is that it constitutes a form of perception of the child and not of the intentions of the parents. Here it would be good to remember that "The road to hell is full of good intentions". A well-meaning parent can easily convey an indifferent communication to his children with questions such as the following:

• Preference of one child over another
• Refusing to keep promises
• Altering or hindering relationships with your children's friends
• Making fun of children's ideas

Note that many parents, even good parents, do this because of the pressures they find themselves in. Others do it because they are neurotic themselves and place their needs above those of their children.

Horney observed that children respond not with passivity and weakness to parental indifference, as we believe, but rather with anger, a response that the author describes as basic hostility. Getting frustrated leads to a first response in an effort to protest injustice.

Some children perceive this hostility to be effective and over time it becomes a generalized response to life's difficulties. In other words; They develop an aggressive adaptive style, saying to themselves, "If I have the power, no one can harm me."

However, most children are oversaturated with basic anxiety, which almost always translates into a fear of abandonment and feeling helpless. As a matter of survival, basic hostility can be suppressed and the parents achieve victory. If this attitude seems to work best for the child, then it will establish itself as the preferred adaptive strategy (compliance). They say to themselves, "If I can make you love me, then you won't hurt me."

Some children find that neither aggression nor compliance eliminates perceived parental indifference, so they they solve the problem by abandoning the family struggle and getting into themselves, becoming concerned about them primarily. This is the third adaptive strategy. They say to themselves: "If I withdraw, nothing will harm me."

Horney had one more way of looking at neuroses: in terms of the image of the self (of himself). For Karen Horney, the self is the center of being; its potential. If one has been healthy then one would have developed an accurate concept of who I am and therefore I can feel free to push that potential (self-realization). These types of theories could be considered Karen Horney's version of psychoanalysis.

The neurotic has a different view of things. The neurotic self is "split" into a ideal self and a despised self. Other theorists speak of a "mirror" self, the one you think others see. If we look around us (accurately or not) believing that others are looking down on us, then we will internalize this feeling as if it were truly our perception of ourselves themselves. On the other hand, if we are failing in some way, this would imply that there are certain ideals that we are submitting to. We are creating an ideal self outside of our "possibilities." We have to understand that the ideal self is not a positive goal; quite the contrary, it is unreal and ultimately impossible to achieve. Therefore, the neurotic balances between hating themselves and pretending to be perfect.

Horney called this close relationship between ideal and despised selves as "the tyranny of the possible"and of the neurotics the"fight for glory".

• Person submissive believes that "it should be sweet, self-sacrificing and holy."
• Person aggressive says "should be strong, recognized and a winner".
• Person introverted she believes that "it should be independent, reserved and perfect".

And while he is vacillating between these two impossible selves, the neurotic is alienated from his own self and withdrawn from realizing his true potentials.

At first glance, it would appear that Horney stole some of Adler's best ideas. It is clear, for example, that their three adaptive strategies are very close to the three Adlerian types. It is, in fact, quite logical to think that Karen was heavily influenced by Adler, but if we get closer to how she derived the three strategies from her (a through collapsing groups of neurotic needs), we can see that she simply reached the same conclusions from a different approach. However, there is no doubt that both Horney and Adler (and Fromm and Sullivan) constitute an unofficial school of psychiatry. They are usually called neo-Freudians, although the term is quite imprecise. Unfortunately, the other common term is that of social psychologists, which, although accurate, is one more term used to designate an area of ​​study.

It is important to note how Horney's theory approaches Adler's in terms of the differences between the desire for perfection healthy and neurotic, and even, to anticipate our revised authors a bit, how her conceptualization resembles that of Carl Rogers. Many times I think that when several people offer similar ideas, it is a good sign that we are reaching something of value.

Karen Horney had a couple more interesting ideas that we should mention. First of all, she criticized the Freudian idea of ​​penis envy. Although she accepted that this did indeed occur in some neurotic women, it was far from being a universal phenomenon. She suggested that what appeared to be penis envy was actually justified envy of the power of men in this world.

In fact, she said, there could be a male counterpart to penis envy in men, the envy of the womb, meaning that envy that is felt before the feminine ability to raise children. Perhaps, the degree to which many men are heading for success and wanting their last names to endure after their death it is compensation for their inability to endure a part of themselves through carrying, nursing, and raising their children.

A second idea, which is not widely accepted in the psychological community, is that of the self-analysis. Karen Horney wrote one of the first self-help manuals and suggested that with small neurotic problems, we could be our own psychiatrists. We can see here how this idea could threaten a few of those delicate egos that make their lives as therapists.

It is always surprising the reactions that some of psychologists have towards people like Joyce Brothers, the famous psychologist columnist (possibly, this position of some therapists, especially in the psychoanalytic field, is in its early stages of being modified, due to a new opening and flexibility of the orthodox and radical points of view of the schools. N.T.).

Apparently, if we don't work with an official guide, your work will be reduced to being considered "cheap psychology". (From our position, it is very likely that many psychiatrists, fearing less scientific psychotherapy, choose to cling to a bilogic psychiatry, where psychological phenomena have no other place than the organic cause, thus clinging to "science medical ". N.T.).

The most negative comment What I could do to Karen Horney is that her theory is limited to neurosis. In addition to neglecting psychosis and other problems, it isolates the truly healthy person. However, since she places neurotic and healthy people on a continuum, she refers to the neurotic who exists in everyone.

• Karen Horney's best book is Neurosis and Human Growth (1950).
• She also wrote more "popular" versions like The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and Our Inner Conflicts (1945).
• Her ideas and thoughts on therapy can be found at New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939).
• For an in-depth look at the origins of feminist psychology, read Feminine psychology(1967).
• And to read about self-analysis read Self-Analysis (1942).

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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