both our intellectual and our empathic understanding of human behavior. This process involves not just theory and literature but also our own personalities and our insight into ourselves. There is a triangular relationship between literature, theory, and the individual interpreter. Our literary and theoretical interests reflect our own character, the way in which we use theory depends on the degree to which it has become emotionally as well as intellectually meaningful to us, and what we are able to perceive depends on our personality, our theoretical perspective, and our access to our inner life.
I have found Horney’s theory to be a powerful instrument of analysis, and I am eager to share this discovery with others so that their understanding of literature and life might also be enriched by it. I know, however, that no one will entirely agree with my readings, just as I never entirely agree with anyone else’s, and that the application of Horney’s theory might yield different results in other hands.
For those unfamiliar with Horney or with my previous expositions of her ideas, I provide an account of her mature theory in the following chapter. Those who know her theory well may wish to proceed directly to chapter 3.
2 Horney’s Mature Theory
Born in a suburb of Hamburg in 1885, Karen Horney (née Danielsen) attended medical school in Freiburg and completed her studies at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin. She married Oskar Horney in 1909, was in analysis with Karl Abraham in 1910–12, had three daughters between 1911 and 1916, received her M.D. in 1915, and became a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920. She separated from Oskar in 1926 and accepted Franz Alexander’s invitation to become founding Associate Director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in 1932. In 1934, she moved to New York, where she joined the faculties of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the New School for Social Research. Because of her critique of orthodox theory, Horney was forced to resign from the New York Psychoanalytic in 1941, whereupon she founded the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, of which she was dean until her death in 1952.1
Horney’s thought went through three stages. In essays she wrote between 1923 and 1935, she tried to revise Freud’s phallocentric view of feminine psychology while remaining within the framework of classical theory. These essays were largely ignored during her lifetime, but since their republication in Feminine Psychology in 1967, Horney has been widely recognized as the first great psychoanalytic feminist.
Exposed to new ideas and to patients with different problems after she moved to the United States, Horney began to question libido theory, the universality of stages of psycho-sexual development, and many other basic tenets of psychoanalysis. In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), she replaced biology with culture and disturbed human relationships when explaining the origins of neuroses, and she shifted to a predominantly structural paradigm in which she sought to account for behavior in terms of its current function.
In her last two books, Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), Horney described in a systematic way the interpersonal and intrapsychic strategies of defense that people develop in order to cope with the frustration of their psychological needs. While each stage of Horney’s thought is important, I believe that her mature theory represents her most significant contribution. It provides explanations of human behavior in terms of currently existing constellations of defenses and inner conflicts that we can find nowhere else. It is this aspect of her thought that I have found to be of most value for the study of literature and that I shall describe here.
According to Horney, we are not simply tension-reducing or conditioned creatures but have present in us an “evolutionary constructive” force that urges us “to realize” our “given potentialities” (1950, 15). We each have a biologically based inner nature, a “real self,” that it is our object in life to fulfill. Horney would have agreed with Abraham Maslow’s account of the basic psychological needs that must be met if we are to actualize our potentialities. These include physiological survival needs, needs for a safe and stable environment, needs for love and belonging, needs for esteem, and the need for a calling or vocation in which we can use our native capacities in an intrinsically satisfying way (Maslow 1970).
Horney sees healthy human development as a process of self-realization and unhealthy development as a process of self-alienation. If our basic needs are relatively well met, we shall develop “the clarity and depth of [our] own feelings, thoughts, wishes, interests…; the special capacities or gifts [we] may have; the faculty to express [ourselves], and to relate [ourselves] to others with [our] spontaneous feelings. All this will in time enable [us] to find [our] set of values and [our] aims in life” (1950, 17). If our psychological needs are seriously frustrated, we shall develop in a quite different way. Self-alienation begins as a defense against “basic anxiety,” which is “a profound insecurity and vague apprehensiveness” (18) generated by feelings of isolation, helplessness, hostility, and fear. As a result of this anxiety, we “cannot simply like or dislike, trust or distrust, express [our] wishes or protest against those of another, but [we have] automatically to devise ways to cope with people and to manipulate them with minimum damage to [ourselves]” (Horney 1945, 219). We cope with others by developing the interpersonal strategies of defense that I shall examine next, and we seek to compensate for our feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy by an intrapsychic process of self-glorification. These strategies constitute our effort to fulfill our now insatiable needs for safety, love and belonging, and esteem. They are also designed to reduce our anxiety and to provide an outlet for our hostility.
According to Horney, we try to overcome feelings of being unsafe, unloved, and unvalued in a potentially hostile world by moving toward, against, or away from other people. These moves give rise to the neurotic solutions of compliance, aggression, and detachment. Whereas healthy people move flexibly in all three directions, compulsive people are “driven to comply, to fight, to be aloof, regardless of whether the move is appropriate in the particular instance” (Horney 1945, 202). Each solution involves its own constellation of behavior patterns and personality traits, its own conception of justice, and its own set of beliefs about human nature, human values, and the human condition. Each involves also a deal or bargain with fate in which obedience to the dictates of that solution is supposed to be rewarded (see Paris 1991a).
In each defensive move, one of the feelings involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the compliant solution, hostility in the aggressive solution, and isolation in the detached solution. Since all of these feelings are bound to arise under adverse conditions, we make all three defensive moves compulsively and are torn by inner conflicts, since the moves are incompatible with each other. To gain some sense of wholeness, we emphasize one of the moves and become predominantly compliant, aggressive, or detached. Which move we emphasize will depend on a combination of temperamental and environmental factors.
The other trends continue to exist but operate unconsciously and manifest themselves in disguised and devious ways. The conflict between the moves has not been resolved but has gone underground. If the submerged trends are for some reason brought closer to the surface, we experience severe inner turmoil and may become paralyzed, unable to move in any direction at all. When impelled by a powerful influence or the collapse of our predominant solution, we may embrace one of our repressed defensive strategies. Although often experienced as conversion or education, this is merely the substitution of one solution for another.
Horney calls the major solutions compliance, aggression, and detachment in Our Inner Conflicts and self-effacement, expansiveness, and resignation in Neurosis and Human Growth, where she combines the interpersonal and the intrapsychic. The two sets of terms clearly overlap and can often be used interchangeably. In Neurosis and Human Growth, there are three distinct expansive solutions: the narcissistic, the perfectionistic, and the arrogant-vindictive.
