or resignation. The aggressive solution of Our Inner Conflicts corresponds closely to the arrogant-vindictive solution of Neurosis and Human Growth, and, as with the other pairs, I shall use whichever term seems most appropriate in a given context.
Self-effacing people often grew up under the shadow of someone—perhaps a preferred sibling, a beautiful mother, or an overbearing father—and sought love and protection through a self-subordinating devotion. They may have had a fighting spirit at one time, but the need for affection won out and they “became compliant, learned to like everybody and to lean with a helpless admiration” on those they “feared most” (Horney 1950, 222).
The strategies they adopted in childhood evolve into a constellation of character traits, behaviors, and beliefs in the adults. They try to overcome their anxiety by gaining affection and approval and by controlling others through their dependency on them. They need to feel part of something larger and more powerful than themselves, a need that often manifests itself as religious devotion, identification with a group or cause, or morbid dependency in a love relationship. Love appears “as the ticket to paradise, where all woe ends: no more feeling lost, guilty, and unworthy; no more responsibility for self; no more struggle with a harsh world” for which they feel “hopelessly unequipped” (Horney 1950, 240).
In order to gain the love, approval, and support they need, basically compliant people develop certain qualities, inhibitions, and ways of relating. They seek to attach other people by being good, loving, self-effacing, and weak. They become “‘unselfish,’ self-sacrificing,” “overconsiderate,” “overappreciative, overgrateful, generous” (Horney 1945, 51). Appeasing and conciliatory, they tend to blame themselves and feel guilty when they quarrel with another, experience disappointment, or are criticized. They are severely inhibited in their self-assertive and self-protective activities and have powerful taboos against “all that is presumptuous, selfish, and aggressive” (Horney 1950, 219). They glorify suffering and use it to manipulate others and justify themselves.
The compliant defense brings with it not only certain ways of feeling and behaving, but also a special set of values and beliefs. The values “lie in the direction of goodness, sympathy, love, generosity, unselfishness, humility” (Horney 1945, 54). These can be admirable values, but compliant people embrace them because they are necessary to their defense system rather than as genuine ideals. They must believe in turning the other cheek, and they must see the world as displaying a providential order in which people like themselves are rewarded. Their bargain is that if they are generous, loving people who shun pride and do not seek their own gain or glory, they will be well treated by fate and other people. If their bargain is not honored, they may despair of divine justice, they may conclude that they are at fault, or they may have recourse to belief in a higher justice that transcends human understanding. They need to believe not only in the fairness of the world order but also in the goodness of human nature, and here, too, they are liable to disappointment.
In compliant people, says Horney, there are “a variety of aggressive tendencies strongly repressed” (1945, 55). They are repressed because experiencing them or acting them out would clash violently with their need to be good and would radically endanger their whole strategy for gaining love, protection, and approval. It would undermine their bargain with fate. Compliant people’s strategies increase their buried hostility since they invite abuse but also make them afraid of expressing anger or fighting back.
Because of their need for surrender and a safe outlet for their aggression, compliant people are often attracted to their opposite, masterful expansive people whose “egotism, ambition, callousness, unscrupulousness” and “wielding of power” they may consciously condemn but secretly admire (Horney 1945, 54). Merging with such people allows them “to participate vicariously in the mastery of life without having to own it” to themselves (Horney 1950, 244). This kind of relationship usually develops into a morbid dependency that exacerbates compliant people’s difficulties. When the love relationship fails them, they will be terribly disillusioned and may feel that they did not find the right person, that something is wrong with them, or that nothing is worth having.
There are numerous predominantly compliant or self-effacing characters in literature who have been analyzed in Horneyan terms. Starting with Shakespeare, these include Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Viola in Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Desdemona, Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, Prospero (Paris 1991a), the poet in Shakespeare’s sonnets (Lewis 1985; Paris 1991a), and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra (Paris 1991b). In later writers, there is Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Paris 1978b), Thackeray’s Dobbin and Amelia (Paris 1974), Esther Summerson in Dickens’s Bleak House (Eldredge 1986), Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (Paris 1974), Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Paris 1976a), Conrad’s Charley Marlow (Paris 1974, 1993b), the priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (Straub 1986), Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog (Paris 1976b), Alice Mellings in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (Eldredge 1989), and George Bailey in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (Gordon 1994). As is true for characters exemplifying each of the major solutions, most have inner conflicts and manifest other trends. There are many more characters displaying each solution than I shall cite here, since I am mentioning only prime examples who have already been discussed in print.
People in whom expansive tendencies predominate have goals, traits, and values that are the opposite of those of self-effacing people. What appeals to them most is not love, but mastery. They abhor helplessness, are ashamed of suffering, and need to achieve success, prestige, or recognition. There are three expansive types: the narcissistic, the perfectionistic, and the aggressive or arrogant-vindictive.
The arrogant-vindictive solution is in many ways the opposite of the self-effacing one. Arrogant-vindictive people usually have had a particularly harsh childhood in which they have encountered “sheer brutality, humiliations, derision, neglect, and flagrant hypocrisy.” Like the survivors of concentration camps, they go through “a hardening process in order to survive.” As children, they “may make some pathetic and unsuccessful attempts to win sympathy, interest, or affection but finally choke off all tender needs.” Since affection is unattainable, they scorn it or conclude that it does not exist. Thus they have no incentive to please and can give free rein to their bitter resentment. The desire for love is replaced by ambition and a drive toward “vindictive triumph.” They live for the “day of reckoning” when they will prove their superiority, put their enemies to shame, and show how they have been wronged. They dream of becoming the great hero, “the persecutor, the leader, the scientist attaining immortal fame” (Horney 1950, 202–3).
As adults, arrogant-vindictive people are ferociously competitive: they “cannot tolerate anybody who knows or achieves more . . . , wields more power, or in any way questions [their] superiority” (Horney 1950, 198). They have to drag their rivals down or defeat them. They retaliate when injured by hurting their enemies more than they have hurt them. They are ruthless and cynical in their relations with others, seeking to exploit and outsmart everyone. They trust no one and are out to get others before others get them. They avoid emotional involvement and dependency and use the relations of friendship and marriage to enhance their position. They want to be hard and tough and regard all manifestations of feeling as sloppy sentimentality.
Whereas self-effacing people tend to be masochistic, arrogant-vindictive people are often sadistic. They want to enslave others, to play on their emotions, to frustrate, disparage, and humiliate them. Horney does not explain this behavior in sexual terms but sees it partly as their way of retaliating for injuries and partly as a response to their sense of the emptiness and futility of their lives. They develop a pervasive envy of everyone who seems to possess something they lack, whether it be wealth and prestige, physical attractiveness, or love and devotion. The happiness of others “irritates” them. If they “cannot be happy,” “why should [others] be so?” The arrogant-vindictive person must “trample on the joy of others” because if they “are as defeated and
