Neurosis and Human Growth
The tyranny of the should. Horney's mature account of the idealised self.
That central inner force, common to all human beings and yet unique in each, which is the deep source of growth.
Karen Horney's last book sets out a full theory of neurosis as self-alienation. When early conditions deny a child security, Horney argues, the person turns from the real self and builds an idealised image, then reorganises the whole personality around living up to it. She names the machinery in detail: the search for glory, neurotic claims made on other people, the inner dictates that punish any lapse, and the self-hate that follows when the actual self falls short of the idealised one.
Against this she holds self-realisation, the freeing of a person's own capacities. Horney reads the expansive, self-effacing, and resigned solutions as three ways of managing the same split.
For the consulting room the book supplies a working vocabulary for the pride system and a therapeutic aim: loosening the patient's grip on the idealised image so the real self can carry the work of growth.
About the author
Karen Horney
Karen Horney (1885 to 1952) was a German-born American psychoanalyst who trained in Berlin and later practised in the United States. A neo-Freudian, she reworked drive theory to stress social and cultural forces over biology, and built a theory of neurosis around basic anxiety and the tension between the real self and the idealised self. She questioned Freud on the psychology of women, countering penis envy with her own account. Her later book Neurosis and Human Growth set out this framework.
Details
- 1950
- English
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 1950
- 391
- 9780393307757