Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

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. There are thus a total of five major solutions: compliance or self-effacement, narcissism, perfectionism, arrogant-vindictiveness, and detachment 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