Influence and contribution to the psychology of women by Karen Horney - Essay Example

? Karen horney - theorist Karen Horney – Theorist Background Karen Horney was born on 19th September, 1885 in Hamburg, Germany, in the house of Clotlide and Berndt Danielson. Her father was a captain of a ship, a religious, noble man and an authoritarian. His children used to call him “the Bible thrower” because, according to Karen, he actually did throw it! Her mother, Sonni, was a totally different as a person- Berndt’s second wife, 19 years younger than him and considerably a lot urbane. Karen also had an older brother whose name was also Berndt. While she presents her father as a cacophonous disciplinarian who preferred her brother Berndt over her, he seemingly brought her gifts from all over the world and even took her to three sea journeys with him – a very atypical thing for sea captains to do in those days. Nevertheless, she felt dismantled of her father’s affections, and so became extraordinarily attached to her mother, becoming, as she said, “her little lamb.” (Jones C. 1989) When she was of the age of nine, she changed her concept towards life, and became ambitious and even bellicose. She said, “If I couldn’t be pretty, I would be smart,” the only unusual thing in this was that she actually was pretty. Moreover, during this time, she aged something of a crush on her own brother. Beleaguered by her attentions, as one might expect of a teenage boy, he pushed her away. Her mother divorced her father and left him along with Karen and Berndt. In 1906, she got herself admitted in a medical school against her parents’ wishes and also against the admonition of a polite society of that particular time. At the medical school, she met a law student, named Oscar Horney, who she got married to in 1909. Karen gave birth to Brigitte in 1910, the first one of her three daughters. In 1911, her mother Sonni died but left a deep impact on the life of Karen. The bruises of these events were hard on Karen, and she became a victim of psychoanalysis. (Jones C. 1989) She had married a man who was not like her father. Oscar was tyrannical and harsh with his children unlike her father. Horney states that she did not interfere and rather considered this atmosphere good for her children. Only after a few years, she changed her perspective on childrearing. Oscar’s business collapsed in 1923 and he developed meningitis. He became an aggressive, broken man, who argued most of the times. Her brother also died in the same year at the age of 40 due to a pulmonary infection. She became very depressed, to the point of swimming out to a sea piling during holidays with the thought of committing suicide. (Quinn S. 1987) Karen along with her daughters, moved out of Oskar’s house in 1926. She moved to United States four years later in 1930. In those years, Brooklyn was the intellectual center of the world due to the arrival of Jewish refugees from Germany. It was this place where she became friends with people like Eric Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan. Moreover, it was this place where she developed her theories on neurosis, which were based on her experiences as a psychotherapist. (Quinn S. 1987) Key Concepts and Human Nature The most important contribution, perhaps, by Karen Horney for the psychodynamic thought were her disagreements with the views of Freud about women. Horney was never a follower of Freud, but she did study his research and eventually started teaching psychoanalysis at two universities, Berlin and New York psychoanalytic institutes. After her persistence that Freud’s thought of the congenital difference between males and females was biased, she decided to leave the institute and establish her own school known as the American Institute of Psychoanalysis. (Quinn S. 1987) In several ways, Horney was far ahead of her time and although she had already died when the feminist movement took place, she was the one who changed the way psychology conceptualized males and females. She contravened the concept of Freud of penis envy with something of her own, called as womb envy, or man’s envy of women’s ability to engender children. She further argued that men atone for this inability by assaying for achievement and success in other departments. She also disagreed with Freud's point of view that males and females were born with inborn antithesis in their personality. Instead of adducing biological differences, she demanded for a societal and cultural explanation.  According to her, men and women were equal outside of the cultural confinement.  These arguments, although not much accepted at the time, were used years after her death to help promote gender equality. (Westkott M. 1986) Healthy Personality as viewed by Karen Horney Horney was also famous for her study of neurotic personality.  She described neurosis as a maladaptive and prejudicial way of dealing with relationships.  Those people, who are unhappy and sad, desperately look out relationships in order to feel better about them. Their way of sheltering these relationships include presentation of their own insecurity and dearth which eventually pushes others away. Many of us have come in contact with people who successfully annoy or frighten people away with their adherence, significant lack of self respect, and even threatening behavior. Horney’s point of view about these individuals was that they adapted this personality style through a childhood filled with anxiety.  And although this way of behaving with others may have been beneficial in their youth, as adults it serves to almost assure that their needs will not be met. (Westkott M. 1986) She recognized three fundamental ways of dealing with the world that are formed by an upbringing in a neurotic family. Which were: Moving Toward People, Moving against People, and Moving Away From People.  (Westkott M. 1986)   Moving Towards People: Some children who feel a lot of distress and helplessness move toward people to seek help and acceptance in their minds.  They are attempting to feel worthy and they believe that the only way to gain this is through the acceptance of others.  These people have an agonizing need to be liked, involved, being important, and appreciated.  That’s not all, they will often fall in love immediately or feel an artificial but very strong adherence to people they may not know so well. Their exertion to make that person love them creates an irritating clinginess that often results in the other person leaving the relationship. (Horney K. 1937)   Moving Against People: Another way to bicker with indecision and anxiety is to try to force your power onto others in order to feel good yourself.  The people with this type of personality come across as bossy, clamoring, selfish, and even sometimes cruel.  According to Horney, these people try project their own cruelness onto others and use this as a justification to 'get them before they get me.'  Also in these relationships, they appear ruined from the beginning. (Horney K. 1937)   Moving Away From People: One of the consequences of neurotic behavior is a personality puffed up with a social behavior that alienates the person involved from the society. The person affected believes that if they don't get attached with others, they won’t get hurt by them. Although it protects them from emotional pain of relationships, it also keeps away all the positive factors of relationships.  It leaves them feeling lonely and filled with emptiness. (Horney K. 1950) Research Karen Horney's theories have proven that they not only have clinical importance also have a value as an explanatory system that can be used in other disciplines. In recent years, they have been increasingly applied in the study of literature, biography, culture, and gender. They are also applicable to religion. Bernard Paris has stated that Horney's theories are very much appropriate for the analysis of literary characters. One of the fundamental objections to the psychoanalytic study of character has been its reliability on childhood experience to account for the behavior of the adult, since such experience is rarely, if ever, presented in literature. But Horney's theories mainly focus on the types of adult defenses and inner conflicts about which literature often provides a lot of information. They have helped to flourish works and authors not only from most periods of British and American literature, but also from ancient Greece, Rome, France, Russia, Germany, Spain, Norway, and Sweden in a several centuries. They have been applied in the study of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian literature as well. (Jones C. 1989) Critique The emphasis of Karen Horney on the present structure of the psyche has also proven to be of great value in psychobiography. Like the literary critic symbolizes a character or an author, the biographer usually has much information about youth and adulthood but very little or negligible about experiences. Biographical studies of Robert Frost, Charles Evans Hughes, the Kennedys, Stalin, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Felix Frankfurter and Lyndon Johnson have successfully applied Karen Horney’s theories. (Jones C. 1989) Innumerable writers have used Karen Horney’s theory in culture. David M. Potter was particularly impressed by her research on the character traits, inner conflicts, and abhorrent circles created by the competitiveness of American culture. We exchange security for opportunity and then feel anxious and insecure. Paul Wachtel also states that there is something enthusiastic and irrational in the way Americans approach an ever-increasing wealth. We promote competition instead of mutual support and behave aggressively in order to avoid being interpreted as weak. James Huffman puts a great stress that the sense of threat and the inferiority complex that have influenced the American character from the beginning of our history, which has resulted in a compensatory self-idealization and a search for national glory. We make exaggerated claims for ourselves and become aggressive when they are not honored and respected by other nations. Like Potter and Wachtel, Huffman illuminates the American character as fundamentally aggressive. We like our leaders to be antagonistic, and we glorify people who fight their way to the top. Bernard Paris has discussed and explained Victorian culture from Karen Horney’s perspective and has correlated conflicting cultural symbols found in Elizabeth culture with Karen Horney’ strategies of fortification. (Rubins J. L. 1978) Applications of the Theory Karen Horney’s theory has been rediscovered recently by feminists, many of whose positions she had already anticipated during her life. While most of the attention has been given to her earlier papers, her mature theory also has important implications and applications for understanding gender identity, masculine and feminine psychology. Impressive work has been done in this discipline by Alexandra Symonds and Marcia Westkott who are social psychologists. Horney's mature theory has also been used to explain gender issues in famous books by Helen De Rosis and Victoria Pellegrino and Claudette Dowling. Symonds’s researches are mainly based on her clinical experience with women who were the victims of their feminine role, or who were trying to escape that role but were finding it difficult, or who seemed to have escaped but were having trouble dealing with the consequences of doing it. The starting point in every case was a culture that suited women to be self-effacing and dependent, while boys were encouraged to be independent and hostile. While focusing on the quandary of women, Symonds recognized that boys develop difficulties of their own as a result of cultural institutionalizing. (Rubins J. L. 1978) Personal Response The theory of Karen Horney not only has applications in other fields, but it has a great value in the educational sphere. We, the students can evaluate a lot of our experiences based on her theories. These theories can help us better understand the psychology of human beings. In addition, it makes us aware of that the conditions and circumstances offered to children in their childhood affect them a lot when they grow up to be an adult. It helps and encourages us to improve our family atmosphere about treating everyone equally and not neglecting anyone of our love and affection. We can learn a lot and get benefitted a lot if we apply the rules and analysis provided by Karen Horney’s theory of social humanistic psychoanalysis. Conclusion In conclusion, Karen Horney is very important for her contributions to feminine psychology, which had been forgotten for many years but has been highly influential since their publication in Feminine Psychology in the year of 1967. They are especially noteworthy for their analysis of female development from a woman's point of view and for their emphasis on the cultural construction and development of gender. Karen Horney’s researches on feminine psychology were unlike her first two books which had a great impact in that time, and their explanation for the importance of culture and for an anatomical model of neurosis continues to manipulate people’s minds. (Quinn S. 1987) References Jones, C. (1989). Karen Horney. New York: Chelsea House. Quinn, S. (1987). A mind of her own: The life of Karen Horney. New York: Summit Books. Horney, K. (1937). The neurotic personality of our time. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Westkott, M. (1986). The feminist legacy of Karen Horney. New Haven: Yale University Press. Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. New York: Norton. Rubins, J. L. (1978). Karen Horney: Gentle rebel of psychoanalysis. New York: Dial Press Top of Form Bottom of Form Bottom of Form Read More