Karen Horney: Neurotic

Needs and Trends

The Childhood Need for Safety and Security
• Horney believed that childhood was dominated by the safety need, by
which she meant the need for security and freedom from fear
(Horney, 1937). Whether infants experience a feeling of security and
an absence of fear is decisive in determining the normality of their
personality development. A child’s security depends entirely on how
the parents treat the child. The major way parents weaken or prevent
security is by displaying a lack of warmth and affection.
Ways of Undermining a Child’s Security
• Parents can act in various ways to undermine their child’s security and
thereby induce hostility. These include obvious preference for one
sibling over another, unfair punishment, erratic behavior, promises
not kept, ridicule, humiliation, and isolation of the child from peers.
• Horney argued that children know whether their parents’ love is
genuine. False demonstrations and insincere expressions of affection
do not easily fool children. The child may feel the need to repress the
hostility engendered by the parents’ undermining behaviors for
reasons of helplessness, fear of the parents, need for genuine love, or
guilt feelings
Repressing Hostility toward Parents
• 1. Horney placed great emphasis on the infant’s helplessness, which
depends totally on their parents’ behavior. If children are kept in an
excessively dependent state, then their feelings of helplessness will be
encouraged. The more helpless children feel, the less they dare to oppose
or rebel against the parents. This means that the child will repress the
resulting hostility, saying, in effect, “I have to repress my hostility because I
need you.”
• 2. Children can easily be made to feel fearful of their parents through
punishment, physical abuse, or more subtle forms of intimidation. The
more frightened children become, the more they will repress their hostility.
In this instance, the child is saying, “I must repress my hostility because I
am afraid of you.”
• 3. Guilt is yet another reason why children repress hostility. They are
often made to feel guilty about any hostility or rebelliousness. They
may be made to feel unworthy, wicked, or sinful for expressing or
even harboring resentments toward their parents. The more guilt the
child feels, the more deeply repressed will be the hostility. This
repressed hostility, resulting from a variety of parental behaviors,
undermines the childhood need for safety and is manifested in the
condition Horney called basic anxiety.
Basic Anxiety: The Foundation of Neurosis
• Horney defined basic anxiety as an “insidiously increasing, all-
pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile world”
(Horney, 1937, p. 89). It is the foundation on which all later neuroses
develop, and it is inseparably tied to feelings of hostility, helplessness,
and fear (see Hjertass, 2009).
• In childhood we try to protect ourselves against basic anxiety in four
quite different ways: securing affection and love, being submissive,
attaining power, or withdrawing.
Securing Affection

• By securing affection and love from other people, the person is

saying, in effect, “If you love me, you will not hurt me.” There are
several ways by which we may gain affection, such as trying to do
whatever the other person wants, trying to bribe others, or
threatening others into providing the desired affection.
Being Submissive
• Being submissive as a means of self-protection involves complying
with the wishes of either one particular person or of everyone in our
social environment. Submissive people avoid doing anything that
might antagonize others. They dare not criticize or give offense in any
way. They must repress their personal desires and cannot defend
against abuse for fear that such defensiveness will antagonize the
abuser. Most people who act submissive believe they are unselfish
and self-sacrificing. Such persons seem to be saying,“If I give in, I will
not be hurt.”
Attaining Power
• By attaining power over others, a person can compensate for
helplessness and achieve security through success or through a sense
of superiority. Such people seem to believe that if they have power,
no one will harm them.
Withdrawing
• These three self-protective devices have something in common—by
engaging in any of them the person is attempting to cope with basic anxiety
by interacting with other people. The fourth way of protecting oneself
against basic anxiety involves withdrawing from other people, not physically
but psychologically. Such a person attempts to become independent of
others, not relying on anyone else for the satisfaction of internal or external
needs.
• The withdrawn person achieves independence with regard to internal or
psychological needs by becoming aloof from others, no longer seeking them
out to satisfy emotional needs. The process involves a blunting, or
minimizing, of emotional needs. By renouncing these needs, the withdrawn
person guards against being hurt by other people.
Neurotic Needs
• Horney believed that any of the self-protective mechanisms could become so
permanent a part of the personality that it assumes the characteristics of a
drive or need in determining the individual’s behavior. She listed 10 such
needs, which she termed neurotic needs because they are irrational solutions
to one’s problems. The 10 neurotic needs are:
• 1. Affection and approval 7. Achievement or ambition
• 2. A dominant partner 8. Self-sufficiency
• 3. Power 9. Perfection
• 4. Exploitation 10. Narrow limits to life
• 5. Prestige
• 6. Admiration
Neurotic Trends
• From her work with patients, she concluded that the needs could be
presented in three groups, each indicating a person’s attitudes toward
the self and others. She called these three categories of directional
movement the neurotic trends. The neurotic trends involve compulsive
attitudes and behaviors; that is, neurotic persons are compelled to
behave in accordance with at least one of the neurotic trends. They are
also displayed indiscriminately, in any and all situations. The neurotic
trends are:
1. Movement toward other people—the compliant personality,
2. Movement against other people—the aggressive personality, and
3. Movement away from other people—the detached personality.
Karen Horney’s Personality Types
• Horney identified three unconscious strategies or movements
employed by different types of neurotic individuals to deal with basic
anxiety:
• • 1) the compliant type moves toward other people;
• • 2) the hostile type moves against other people; and
• • 3) the detached type moves away from other people.
Ideal Vs. Real Self
• Such strategies may establish an ideal self in tension with the real self,
and a neurotic person may develop blind spots by denying experiences
that are inconsistent with the ideal self. These neurotic solutions may
induce self-hatred or a tyranny of the should.
• idealized self-image For normal people, the self-image is an idealized
picture of oneself built on a flexible, realistic assessment of one’s
abilities. For neurotics, the self image is based on an inflexible,
unrealistic self-appraisal.
• tyranny of the should An attempt to realize an unattainable idealized
self-image by denying the true self and behaving in terms of what we
think we should be doing.