2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Karen Horney is an American psychoanalyst and psychologist, one of the key figures in neo-Freudianism. She emphasized the importance of the impact of the social environment on the formation of personality
1. Neurotic need for affection and approval: the need to please and please everyone, to get their approval; living in accordance with the expectations of others; shifting the center of gravity from one's own personality to others, the habit of taking into account only their desires and opinions; fear of self-affirmation; fear of hostility from others or hostile feelings towards oneself.
2. Neurotic need for a “partner” who will take charge of life: shifting the center of gravity to a “partner” who must fulfill all life expectations and be responsible for all good and bad; successful manipulation of the “partner” becomes the main task; overestimating "love" because it is assumed that "love" solves all problems; fear of being abandoned; fear of loneliness.
3. Neurotic need to limit your life to a tight framework: the need to be undemanding, be content with little and limit your ambitious aspirations and desires for material goods; the need to remain inconspicuous and play secondary roles; diminishing one's abilities and potentialities, recognizing modesty as the highest virtue; the desire to save rather than spend; fear of making any demands; fear of having or defending expansive desires.
4. Neurotic desire for power: the desire for domination over others; compulsive dedication to business, duty, responsibility; disrespect for other people, their individuality, dignity, feelings, the desire to subjugate them to yourself; the presence with varying degrees of pronounced destructive elements; admiration for any strength and contempt for weakness; fear of uncontrollable situations; fear of helplessness. The neurotic need to control oneself and other people with the help of reason and foresight: belief in the omnipotence of intellect and reason; denial of the power of emotional forces and contempt for them; giving the utmost importance to foresight and prediction; a sense of superiority over others, based on the ability of such foresight; contempt in oneself for everything that does not correspond to the image of intellectual superiority; fear of recognizing the objective boundaries of the power of reason; fear of appearing "stupid" and making a wrong judgment. The neurotic need to believe in the omnipotence of the will: a sense of fortitude arising from belief in magical willpower; the reaction of despair to any frustration of desires; the tendency to give up desires or limit desires and lose interest in them due to fear of "failure"; fear of recognizing any limitations of absolute will.
5. Neurotic need to exploit others and the desire not to wash, but to achieve advantages for oneself: evaluation of other people, first of all, from the point of view of whether or not they can be exploited and benefitted; various areas of exploitation - money, ideas, sexuality, feelings; pride in one's ability to exploit others; fear of being exploited and thus being made a fool.
6. Neurotic need for social recognition or prestige: literally everything (objects, money, personal qualities, actions, feelings) are evaluated in accordance with their prestige; self-esteem is entirely dependent on public recognition; different (traditional or rebellious) ways of arousing envy or admiration; fear of losing a privileged position in society (“humiliation”) either due to external circumstances or due to internal factors.
7. Neurotic need for admiration for oneself: inflated self-image (narcissism); the need for admiration not for what a person is or what he possesses in the eyes of others, but for imaginary qualities; self-esteem, wholly dependent on conformity to this image and on admiration for this image by other people; fear of losing admiration (being "humiliated").
8. Neurotic ambition in the sense of personal achievement: the need to surpass others not by what you are, but by means of your activities; the dependence of self-esteem on how you manage to be the best - a lover, an athlete, a writer, a worker - especially in your own eyes, recognition from others also matters, and its absence causes offense; an admixture of destructive tendencies (aimed at inflicting defeat on others), always present, although differing in intensity; relentlessly pushing oneself toward greater achievements despite constant anxiety; fear of failure.
9. Neurotic need for self-sufficiency and independence: the need to never need anyone, or to resist any influence, or to be absolutely unconnected, since any closeness means the danger of enslavement; the presence of distance and isolation is the only source of safety; fear of the need for other people, affection, intimacy, love.
10. Neurotic need to achieve perfection and invulnerability: constant striving for perfection; obsessive reflections and self-accusations in connection with possible shortcomings; a sense of superiority over others due to their perfection; fear of finding flaws or making mistakes; fear of criticism or reproaches.
How do neurotic inclinations ("minus-love") differ from healthy ones ("plus-love")?
Obsessive character. Totality (lack of selectivity: for example, if a person needs "-love", then he must receive it from a friend and an enemy, from an employer and a boot polisher). Strong anxiety reactions in response to the frustration of neurotic tendencies ("all will be lost"), which proves that neurotic tendencies keep our sense of security. Many neurotic inclinations, in addition, have the force of an all-consuming passion, subjectively perceived by the individual as "true happiness." The feeling of an inverted price tag: for example, it is not a person who has willpower, but, on the contrary, it is a person. Essentially, neurotic tendencies are devoid of freedom, spontaneity, and meaning.
What can parents do badly to a child, what causes neurosis in later life? The answer is simple: "a child may be prevented from realizing that he is an individual with his own rights and responsibilities."
The more a person defends his neurotic inclinations (“rightness”: in principle everything is fine, everything is in order and nothing needs to be changed), the more questionable their real value (cf. the need for a bad government to defend and justify its activities).
Horney K. Introspection (1942).
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