Karen Horney, psychoanalyst, neo-Freudian (1885 -- 1952) | NCP-LA

Karen Horney (Danielsen) was a German psychoanalyst who practiced in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was in relation to her theories of sexuality and of the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis. She is credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy. She disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women and she traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology.

Horney was bewildered by psychiatrist' tendency to place so much emphasis on the male sexual organ. Horney also reworked the Freudian Oedipal complex of the sexual elements, claiming that the clinging to one parent and jealousy of the other was simply the result of anxiety, caused by a disturbance in the parent-child relationship.

Horney saw narcissism quite differently from Freud, Kohut and other mainstream psychoanalytic theorists in that she did not posit a primary narcissism but saw the narcissistic personality as the product of a certain kind of early environment acting on a certain kind of temperament.  For her, narcissistic needs and tendencies are not inherent in human nature.

Narcissism is different from Horney’s other major defensive strategies or solutions in that it is not compensatory. Self-idealization is compensatory in her theory, but it differs from narcissism. All the defensive strategies involve self-idealization, but in the narcissistic solution it tends to be the product of indulgence rather than of deprivation. The Narcissist self-esteem is not strong, however, because it is not based on genuine accomplishments.

Horney's mature theory of neurosis makes a major contribution to psychological thought -- particular the study of personality -- that deserves to be more widely known and applied.

Her major work Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle to Self-Realization was published in 1950.

Horney shared Abraham Maslow's view that self-actualization is something that all people strive for.  By self she understood the core of one's own being and potential. Horney believed that if we have an accurate conception of our own, the we are free to realize our potential and achieve what we wish, within reasonable boundaries. Thus, she believed that self-actualization is the healthy person's aim through life -- as opposed to the neurotic clinging to a set of key needs.

Horney regarded that we can have two view of our self: the real self and the ideal self. The real self is who and what we actually are. The ideal self is the type of person we feel we should be.

The neurotic person's self is split between an idealized self and a real self. As a result, neurotic individual s feel that they somehow do not live up to the ideal self. The goals set out by the neurotic are not realistic or possible. The real self then degenerates into a despised self. and the neurotic person assumes that this is the actual self. She concluded that these ingrained traits of the psyche forever prevent an individual's potential from being actualized unless the cycle of neurosis is somehow broken, though treatment or in less severe cases life lessons.