just, dutiful, he is entitled to fair treatment by others and by life in general. This conviction of an infallible justice operating in life gives him a feeling of mastery” (Horney 1950, 197). Success is not a matter of luck, of being the favorite of fortune, as it is for the narcissist, or of superior shrewdness, talent, and ruthlessness, as it is for the arrogant-vindictive person; rather, it is a proof of virtue. Ill fortune may mean that he is not really virtuous or that the world is unjust. Either conclusion shakes him “to the foundations of his psychic existence,” invalidating “his whole accounting system” and conjuring up “the ghastly prospect of helplessness.” If he recognizes “an error or failure of his own making,” self-effacing trends and self-hate may come to the fore.
Predominantly perfectionistic characters who have been analyzed in Horneyan terms include Brutus and Coriolanus (Paris 1991b), Othello, Cordelia, and Macbeth before the murder (Paris 1991a) in Shakespeare; Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (Eldredge 1982); and three characters in Jane Austen—Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, Knightly in Emma, and Anne Elliot in Persuasion (Paris 1978b).
People who are predominantly resigned or detached usually have had a childhood in which there were “cramping influences” against which they “could not rebel openly, either because they were too strong or too intangible.” Demands were made for love, understanding, conformity, or emotional support that threatened to “engulf” them. They felt that they had to submit to these demands in order to obtain love, but they also wanted to rebel against “the bonds put around” them. They handled this situation by withdrawal. Putting “an emotional distance between [themselves] and others,” they no longer wanted affection nor did they want to fight. This helped them preserve their individuality, but they had to put a check on their feelings and “retract all those wishes and needs which would require others for their fulfillment.” While retracting their wishes made them more independent, it also sapped their “vitality and maim[ed their] sense of direction” (Horney 1950, 275–76).
Whereas self-effacing people crave love and expansive people seek mastery, detached people worship freedom and independence. They want to be left alone, to have nothing expected of them, to be subject to no restrictions. They have a “hypersensitivity to influence, pressure, coercion or ties of any kind” (Horney 1950, 266, emphasis in original). They may react with anxiety to physical pressure from clothing, closed spaces, long-term obligations, the inexorability of time, the laws of cause and effect, traditional values and rules of behavior, or, indeed, anything that interferes with their absolute freedom. They want to do what they please when they please, but since they are alienated from their spontaneous desires, their freedom is rather empty. It is a freedom from what they feel as coercion rather than a freedom to fulfill themselves. Their desire for freedom may take the form of a craving for serenity, which means for them “simply the absence of all troubles, irritations, or upsets” (263).
Detached people disdain the pursuit of worldly success and have a profound aversion to effort. They have a strong need for superiority and usually look on their fellows with condescension, but they realize their ambition in imagination rather than through actual accomplishments. They make themselves invulnerable by being self-sufficient. This involves not only living in imagination but also restricting their desires. In order to avoid being dependent on the environment, they try to subdue their inner cravings and to be content with little. They cultivate a “don’t care” attitude and protect themselves against frustration by believing that “nothing matters.”
Detached people withdraw from both other people and themselves. They seek privacy, shroud themselves “in a veil of secrecy,” and, in their personal relations, draw around themselves “a kind of magic circle which no one may penetrate” (Horney 1945, 75–76). They withdraw from themselves by suppressing or denying their feelings. Their resignation from active living gives them an “onlooker” attitude that often enables them to be excellent observers both of others and of their own inner processes. Their insight divorced from feeling, they look at themselves “with a kind of objective interest, as one would look at a work of art” (74).
Their withdrawal from themselves is in part an effort to resolve their inner conflicts. In this solution, says Horney, the subordinated trends are not deeply repressed; they are visible to the trained observer and are rather easily brought to awareness. Because detached people are likely to entertain the attitudes of the subordinated solutions, their values are highly contradictory. They have a “permanent high evaluation” of what they regard “as freedom and independence” and cultivate individuality, self-reliance, and an indifference to fate. But they may at one time “express an extreme appreciation for human goodness, sympathy, generosity, self-effacing sacrifice, and at another time swing to a complete jungle philosophy of callous self-interest” (Horney 1945, 94).
In order to reduce their vulnerability, detached people believe, “consciously or unconsciously, that is it better not to wish or expect anything. Sometimes this goes with a conscious pessimistic outlook on life, a sense of its being futile anyhow and of nothing being sufficiently desirable to make an effort for it” (Horney 1950, 263, emphasis in original). They do not usually rail against life, however, but accept their fate with ironic humor or stoical dignity. They try to escape suffering by being independent of external forces, by feeling that nothing matters, and by concerning themselves only with things within their power. Their bargain is that if they ask nothing of others, they will not be bothered; if they try for nothing, they will not fail; and if they expect little of life, they will not be disappointed.
Predominantly detached characters who have been analyzed in Horneyan terms include Horatio in Hamlet, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Apemantus in Timon of Athens (Paris 1991a); Mr. Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Paris 1978b); Dostoevsky’s underground man (Paris 1974); and Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury (Butery 1989). The detached solution is particularly prevalent in twentieth-century literature, and much work remains to be done with characters who manifest it.
Horney describes childhood experiences typical for those who have adopted each of the major solutions, but most children have a combination of these experiences and develop a combination of defenses. Conflicts between the solutions cause oscillations, inconsistencies, and self-hate. One of the most significant features of Horney’s theory is that it permits us to make sense of contradictory attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs by seeing them as part of structure of inner conflicts. Horneyan theory has a dynamic quality: solutions combine, conflict, become stronger or weaker, need to be defended, generate vicious circles, and are replaced by others when they collapse. This quality of the theory is difficult to convey in exposition, but it will become evident in our discussions of literature.
While interpersonal difficulties are creating the movements toward, against, and away from people, and the conflicts between these moves, concomitant intrapsychic problems are producing their own defensive strategies. To compensate for feelings of self-hate and inadequacy, individuals create, with the aid of their imagination, an “idealized image” of themselves that they endow with “unlimited powers” and “exalted faculties” (Horney 1950, 22). The idealized image, in turn, generates neurotic claims, tyrannical “shoulds,” and neurotic pride, all of which ultimately increase self-hate.
The content of the idealized image is much influenced by our predominant solution and the attributes it exalts. The idealized image of self-effacing people “is a composite of ‘lovable’ qualities, such as unselfishness, goodness, generosity, humility, saintliness, nobility, sympathy” (Horney 1950, 222). Arrogant-vindictive people see themselves as masters of all situations who are smarter, tougher, more realistic than other people. Narcissists see themselves as prophets and benefactors of mankind who have unlimited energies and are capable of magnificent achievements, effortlessly attained. Perfectionists regard themselves as models of rectitude who achieve a flawless excellence in the whole conduct of life. The idealized image of detached or resigned people “is a composite of self-sufficiency, independence, self-contained serenity,
