# Neurosis and Human Growth By Karen Horney **URL:** **By** Robert Masters **Published:** March 1, 1974 --- “A friend of mine once commented that Karen Horney was, at heart, an Aristotelian.” A friend of mine once commented that Karen Horney was, at heart, an Aristotelian. I think this is true in at least two senses. First, there is Horney's basic attitude toward human nature: "You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree, but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular potentialities." Secondly, there is the way her mind works. She is one of those rare thinkers who combine a faculty for tightly logical theorizing with a sensitive, rich capacity for empirical observation. Karen Horney's theory of neurosis, as set forth in her magnum opus, _Neurosis and Human Growth_, can be summarized in a few sentences. Every person has a "real self," an inner arena of his own deepest and most genuine "feelings, wishes, beliefs, and energies." But if he is subjected, from earliest childhood, to socially imposed duties (what Horney calls "shoulds"), his real self will not mature. Instead, he will go in one of three directions: (1) he may seek to satisfy the demands imposed on him, internalizing those demands and struggling to remake himself in their image. If so, dominated by his "idealized self," he becomes an "expan-sive" type of neurotic, such as Ayn Rand's character Peter Keating in _The Fountainhead_. Or (2) convinced that he cannot live up to the shoulds, he may surrender to a general sense of failure and accept a position of dependence on others, becoming a "self-effacing" type. Or (3) to protect his real self from the ravages of the shoulds, he may largely withdraw from active participation in life, becoming a "resigned" neurotic, cut off from others but preserving his deep personal feelings in the privacy of his own inner sanctum. Within this simple framework Horney presents a truly dazzling array of clinical observations. She comments wisely on "the neurotic's belief in the supremacy of the mind," a belief that causes him to see issues not in terms of "mind and feelings but mind versus feelings." (This is a point which Objectivists would do well to ponder.) She carefully discusses the problem of "self-hate" and how it serves as an obstacle to dealing with psychological problems. And, in one particularly brilliant passage, she shows the absurdity of the neurotic's concept of "justice"—a Sunday-school concept which holds, in essence, that "If I do X, I'm entitled to Y"—thus obliterating the only question that matters: "How can I get Y?" These are only a few of the book's high points. Horney's system has some major shortcomings, most of them stemming from the fact that she was writing more than twenty years ago, before the emergence of modern humanistic psychology. Most serious is her complete ignoring of the somatic (bodily) side of psychological processes; she says nothing, for example, about the crucial role of muscular tensions in emotional repression. Also, her views on psychotherapy tend to be naively analytical; to cure a patient, she seems to believe, the therapist merely needs to give him full "insight" into the nature of his problems. (This approach—if we accept Maslow's characterization of neurosis as a deficiency disease—may be compared to trying to help a starving man by giving him a lecture on nutritional biochemistry.) Finally, she is not really very clear on the positive nature of the "real self." Horney must therefore be read carefully and critically. But then, so must any important author. _Neurosis and Human Growth_ is, imperishably, a classic. There has probably never been a richer or more perceptive study of the crippling effect of duties on psychological growth. _Reviewed by Robert Masters / Psychology (391 Pages, Indexed) / BFL Price $2.95_