Personality Psychology
The Inner Psychic Approach
Horney's Feminist Psychoanalysis
Rizqy Amelia Zein
Department of Personality and Social Psychology
course website: https://s.id/amerta
google classroom: cyhrwcw
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
A short summary 
- Her differences with Freud began when she took issue with his psychological portrayal of women
- An early feminist, she argued that psychoanalysis focused more on men’s development than on women’s
- To counter Freud’s contention that women are driven by penis envy, she proposed that men are envious of women for their ability to give birth
The Need for Safety and Security 
- Horney agreed with Freud on one major point—the importance of the early years of childhood in shaping the adult personality
- However, Horney believed that social forces in childhood, not biological forces, influence personality development
- The social relationship between children and their parents is the key factor of personality development
The Need for Safety and Security 
- The childhood was dominated by the safety need, by which Horney meant the need for security and freedom from fear
- A child’s security depends entirely on how the parents treat the child
- The major way parents weaken or prevent security is by displaying a lack of warmth and affection
The Need for Safety and Security 
- Parents can act in various ways to undermine their child’s security and thereby induce hostility
- Obvious preference for one sibling over another, unfair punishment, erratic behavior, promises not kept, ridicule, humiliation, and isolation of the child from peers
The Need for Safety and Security 
- The more helpless children feel, the less they dare to oppose or rebel against the parents
- The child will repress the hostility, saying, “I have to repress my hostility because I need you.”
- Children can be made to feel fearful of their parents through punishment, physical abuse, or more subtle forms of intimidation
- The child is saying, “I must repress my hostility because I am afraid of you.”
The Need for Safety and Security 
- Love can also be another reason for repressing hostility toward parents
- Parents tell their children how much they love them and how much they are sacrificing for them, but the parents’ warmth and affection are not honest
- The child must repress his or her hostility for fear of losing even these unsatisfactory expressions of love
The Need for Safety and Security 
- Guilt is yet another reason why children repress hostility
- They may be made to feel unworthy, wicked, or sinful for expressing or even harboring resentments toward their parents
- This repressed hostility undermines the childhood need for safety and is manifested in the condition Horney called basic anxiety
Basic Anxiety
- "…insidiously increasing, all-pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile world”
- Basic anxiety is the foundation on which all later neuroses develop, and it is inseparably tied to feelings of hostility, helplessness, and fear
- Children may feel “small, insignificant, helpless, deserted, endangered..”
Basic Anxiety
- In childhood we try to protect ourselves against basic anxiety in four different ways:
- Securing affection and love: trying to do whatever the other person wants, trying to bribe or threatening others into providing the desired affection
- Being submissive: self-protection involves complying with the wishes of either one particular person or of everyone in our social environment
Basic Anxiety
- Attaining power: a person can compensate for helplessness and achieve security through success or through a sense of superiority
- Withdrawing: attempting to become independent of others, not relying on anyone else for the satisfaction of internal or external needs
- The process involves a blunting, or minimizing, of emotional needs
Self-protective mechanism 
- A single goal: to defend against basic anxiety
- They are a defense against pain, not a pursuit of well-being or happiness
- Those mechanisms may reduce anxiety, but the cost to the individual is usually an impoverished personality
- The neurotic will pursue the search for safety and security by using more than one of those mechanisms
Neurotics needs 
- Horney listed 10 neurotic needs as those are irrational solutions to one’s problems
- The 10 neurotic needs are: affection and approval, a dominant partner, power, exploitation, prestige, admiration, achievement or ambition, self-sufficiency, perfection, & narrow limits to life.
- Satisfying these needs will not make us feel safe and secure but will only help us to escape the discomfort caused by our anxiety
Neurotic trends 
- Needs could be presented in three groups, each indicating a person’s attitudes toward the self and others
- In the neurotic person, one of these three trends is dominant, whereas the other two are present to a lesser degree
- She called these three categories of directional movement the neurotic trends
Neurotic trends
The compliant personality
- Reflect a desire to move toward other people
- An intense and continuous need for affection and approval, an urge to be loved, wanted, and protected
- A need for one dominant person, such as a friend or spouse, who will take charge of their lives and offer protection and guidance
- Compliant personalities manipulate other people, particularly their partners, to achieve their goals
The compliant personality
- They subordinate their personal desires to those of other people and willing to assume blame and defer to others, never being assertive, critical, or demanding
- They do whatever the situation requires, as they interpret it, to gain affection, approval, and love
- “Look at me. I am so weak and helpless that you must protect and love me.”
The compliant personality
- The compliant persons have repressed profound feelings of defiance
- They have a desire to control, exploit, and manipulate others, the opposite of what their behaviors and attitudes express
- Because their hostile impulses must be repressed, compliant personalities become subservient, always trying to please and asking nothing for themselves
The aggresive personality
- Aggressive personalities move against other people and are driven to surpass others
- In their world, everyone is hostile, and only the fittest and most cunning survive
- They judge everyone in terms of the benefit they will receive from the relationship
The aggresive personality
- They may appear confident of their abilities and uninhibited in asserting and defending themselves
- However, like compliant personalities, aggressive personalities are driven by insecurity, anxiety, and hostility
The detached personality
- They driven to move away from other people and to maintain an emotional distance
- They must not love, hate, or cooperate with others or become involved in any way
- To achieve this total detachment, they strive to become self-sufficient
- Detached personalities have an almost desperate desire for privacy
The detached personality
- Detached personalities suppress or deny all feelings toward other people, particularly feelings of love and hate
- Intimacy would lead to conflict, and that must be avoided
- Because of this constriction of their emotions, detached personalities place great stress on reason, logic, and intelligence
Neurotic trends
- The compliant person believes "I should be sweet, self-sacrificing, saintly."
- The aggressive person says "I should be powerful, recognised, a winner."
- The detached person believes "I should be independent, aloof, perfect.”
The idealized self-image 
- All of us, normal or neurotic, construct a picture of our selves that may or may not be based on reality
- In normal people, the self-image is built on a realistic appraisal of our abilities, potentials, weaknesses, goals, and relations with other people
- If we are to realize our full potential, a state of self-realization, our self-image must clearly reflect our true self
The idealized self-image
- Neurotics, who experience conflict between incompatible modes of behavior, have personalities characterized by disunity and disharmony
- But their attempt to form self-image is not based on a realistic appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses
- Instead, it is based on an illusion, an unattainable ideal of absolute perfection
The Realistic vs Neurotic Self-Image
- A realistic self-image is flexible and dynamic, adapting as the individual develops and changes
- It reflects strengths, growth, and self-awareness
- The realistic image is a goal, something to strive for, and as such it both reflects and leads the person
The Realistic vs Neurotic Self-Image
- By contrast, the neurotic/idealized self-image is static, inflexible, and unyielding
- The neurotic’s self-image is an unsatisfactory substitute for a reality-based sense of self-worth
- Neurotic has little self-confidence because of insecurity and anxiety, and the idealized self-image does not allow for correction of those deficiencies
Tyranny of the shoulds 
- An attempt to realize an unattainable idealized self-image by denying the true self and behaving in terms of what we think we should be doing
- They tell themselves they should be the best or most perfect student, spouse, parent, lover, employee, friend, or child
- They deny their real selves and try to become what they think they should be, or what they need to be to match their idealized self-image
Externalization 
- Externalization involves the tendency to experience conflicts as though they were occurring outside of one
- As attempt to defend against the inner conflicts caused by the discrepancy between idealized and real self-images
- e.g. projecting hatred onto other people or institutions and come to believe that the hatred is emanating from these external sources and not from themselves
Feminine psychoanalysis 
- Horney was especially critical of Freud’s notion of penis envy, which she believed was derived from inadequate evidence
- That is, from Freud’s (very limited) clinical interviews with neurotic women
- Freud described and interpreted this alleged phenomenon from a strictly male point of view in a place and time when women were considered second-class citizens
Feminine psychoanalysis
- Freud suggested that women were victims of their anatomy, forever envious and resentful of men for possessing a penis
penis envy - Freud also concluded that women had poorly developed superegos (a result of inadequately resolved Oedipal conflicts), and inferior body images
- Because women believed they were really castrated men
- Because women believed they were really castrated men
Feminine psychoanalysis
- Horney countered these ideas by arguing that men envied women because of their capacity for motherhood womb envy
- Her position on this issue was based on the pleasure she said she had experienced in childbirth
- If women feel themselves to be unworthy, it is because they have been treated that way in male-dominated cultures
Feminine psychoanalysis
- Women may choose to deny their femininity and to wish, unconsciously, that they were men flight from womanhood
- A condition that can lead to sexual inhibitions
- Horney expressed concern about the psychological conflicts in defining women’s roles and pointed out the differences between the traditional ideal of womanhood with the more modern view
Feminine psychoanalysis
- Horney argued that women must seek their own identity by developing their abilities and pursuing careers
- These contrasting traditional and more modern roles create conflicts that some women to this day have difficulty resolving
Personality Psychology The Inner Psychic Approach Horney's Feminist Psychoanalysis Rizqy Amelia Zein Department of Personality and Social Psychology course website: https://s.id/amerta google classroom: cyhrwcw
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