Karen Horney

Women's psychology

Foreword

Karen Horney (1885-1952) belongs to the galaxy of outstanding figures in the world of psychoanalysis and, along with Helen Deutsch, is the generally recognized founder of the science of female psychology.

For obvious reasons, the works of these authors are generally unknown to the domestic reader, including specialists - psychologists and doctors, who, like all of us, until recently lived in a sexless society of "comrades" and "comrades", where of the three main areas of self-realization of the individual (labor, communication and sex), the second was significantly limited by ideology, and the third - as a social and scientific category, was actually prohibited, and therefore - reduced to a primitive physiological act. I will allow myself to suggest that it was the lack of scientifically based views on the gender-role and psychosexual differentiation of personality in early childhood, the desexualization of school and family education and, as a result, the creation of an entire generation of citizens of an indeterminate sex, not least led to the moral degradation of the family and society as a whole, which we are now witnessing.

It is hard to believe, but today our Institute is the only one in the entire territory of the former USSR, where a course in female psychology is taught. There is a psychology of the individual (also sexless), crime, trade, political struggle, etc., but there is no female psychology, although, I hope, we still have more women than, for example, criminals and politicians. And only now we are returning to the almost completely forgotten understanding that the world does not consist of classes and estates, not of rich and poor, not of bosses and subordinates, who are always secondary, but of men and women. The merit of the scientific formulation of this problem largely belongs to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his follower Karen Horney (who did not agree with her teacher in everything).

Karen Horney was born in Hamburg to a Protestant family. Her father, Berndt Danielsen, was a captain in the Norwegian Navy and a deeply religious man. Karen's mother, Clotilde Ronzelen, a Danish by birth, on the contrary, was distinguished by free-thinking, which, of course, her daughter inherited. In her youth, Karen accompanied her father on long sea voyages, where she acquired a passion for travel and distant lands.

Her decision to pursue medicine - not an ordinary choice for a woman of the early twentieth century - was made under the influence of her mother. After graduating from the University of Berlin (1913) as the best student in the group, Horney specialized in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

At twenty-four, she married the Berlin lawyer Oscar Horney. After living with her husband for twenty-eight years and raising three daughters, in 1937, due to differences in interests, Karen divorced her husband, and from that time she devoted herself entirely to the psychoanalytic movement.

An undeniably talented physician and researcher, Horney became a doctor of medicine at twenty-eight, and by thirty she was already one of the recognized teachers of the newly opened Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. Already one of her first articles "On the origin of the castration complex in women" brought her European fame.

K. Horney went through personal analysis with Hans Sachs, one of the closest associates of 3. Freud and the founder of the first Psychoanalytic Committee (1913), and she received the qualification of a teaching analyst from Karl Abraham, whom 3. Freud considered his most capable student.

Learning from such faithful followers of Freud, it would seem, should have contributed to an unconditional adherence to the ideas of classical psychoanalysis. However, Horney, almost from her first works, begins to actively polemize with the creator of psychoanalytic theory, and one cannot but admit that in a number of cases this polemic was quite productive. The reason for this unexpected “confrontation” is most clearly revealed by Horney herself. In 1926, in The Departure from Femininity, she wrote: “Psychoanalysis is the work of a male genius, and almost all who developed its ideas were also men. It is natural and natural that they were focused on studying the essence of male psychology and understood more in the development of a man than a woman. It is difficult to disagree with this reproach, as well as with the fact that only a differentiated approach to male and female psychology opens the way to the development of a philosophy of a holistic personality. Holism or "philosophy of integrity", where the objective and the subjective, the material and the ideal are combined, formed the basis of all Horney's conceptual approaches.

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Karen Horney(September 16, 1885, Hamburg - December 4, 1952, New York) - psychoanalyst, co-founder of neo-Freudianism, belongs to a galaxy of prominent figures in world psychoanalysis and, along with Helen Deutsch, is the generally recognized founder of the science of female psychology. Karen Horney is the only female psychologist whose name is among the founders of the psychological theory of personality.

She was born into a Norwegian-Danish Protestant family. Mother, Clotilde Ronselen, a Dane, was distinguished by free-thinking, which, no doubt, her daughter inherited.

The decision to go into medicine, quite unusual for women of that time, Karen took under the influence of her mother. She received her education at the University of Berlin. There she met the Berlin lawyer Oskar Horney and in 1909 she married him. At the university, Karen was engaged in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and in 1913 she graduated from it as the best student in the group. Also in 1913, Karen Horney received her doctorate in medicine and by the age of thirty she became one of the most recognized teachers at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Karen Horney went through her personal analysis with Hans Sachs, one of the closest associates of Sigmund Freud and the founder of the first Psychoanalytic Committee (1913), and she received the qualification of a teaching analyst from Karl Abraham, whom Sigmund Freud considered his most capable student.

She took the theories of Sigmund Freud as the basis of her views, although she looked at them critically. Karen Horney begins developing her own theories with the assertion that universal mental norms simply do not exist: behavior that is regarded as neurotic in one culture may be completely normal for another, and vice versa. According to Karen Horney, we can only judge what is the norm and what is not by considering the individual in the context of the specific cultural conditions in which he finds himself. Already in her first works, Horney entered into polemics with Freud. Orthodox psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis of the Freudian type), according to Horney, bears the imprint of the masculinity of modern society, in which the function of a woman is strictly defined. Horney, almost from her first works, begins to actively polemize with the creator of psychoanalytic theory, and it must be admitted that in a number of cases this polemic was quite productive.

A significant role in the life of Karen Horney was played by Franz Alexander, who, having declared his departure from psychoanalysis and leaving Berlin because of this, in fact skillfully implied analytical approaches to American social psychology. In many ways, Karen Horney went to the creation of a science of female psychology in a similar way. It was Franz Alexander who, in 1932, invited Karen Horney to Chicago as deputy director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. After working together for about two years, Alexander and Horney recognized that their further collaboration was impossible, since each had his own path. Karen Horney leaves for New York, where in 1941 she organized the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and later became the founding editor of the American Psychoanalytic Journal. In New York, she lived until her death, teaching at the institute, leading a private psychoanalytic practice and developing her theory of neuroses.

Karen Horney's idea that the nature of neurosis depends primarily on social factors, on cultural values, turned out to be very productive. As a result, significant changes took place within Freudianism. Thus, the theory of sublimation and the doctrine of libido were rejected. Neo-Freudians essentially "sociologised" psychology.

According to Horney, neurosis is formed by the impact of the surrounding social environment and the destruction of human relationships. Orthodox psychoanalysis focuses on genetic and instinctive causes. As a result, the meaning of therapy changes. The goal of orthodox psychoanalysis is to help you deal with your instincts. According to Horney, the goal of therapy is to restore relationships with people and oneself, to find a point of support in oneself, to get rid of neurotic defense mechanisms that only partially help a person cope with life's difficulties, but with a deeper look close the possibility of a normal life.

The basis of any neurosis is usually seen as an internal conflict (confrontation between something and something in the human psyche). According to Freud, neurotic conflict is a struggle between the repressed (instincts) and the repressing forces (culture). According to Horney, a neurotic conflict is a struggle of incompatible combinations between several neurotic tendencies. Under neurotic inclinations (the term was introduced by Horney), Horney understood compulsive (obsessive) drives (also understood as the basis of neurosis). Horney considered the compulsive need for love and the compulsive desire for power to be one of the main neurotic tendencies. The neurotic desire for love and the neurotic rivalry can be in conflict with each other - it is impossible to go over the heads of people and take care of them (expecting to receive love in return). In principle, even for a healthy person, competition will mean a lack of showing love and receiving love (love - in the broadest sense of the word). Neurotic tendencies usually have a function (hidden benefit). Ultimately, it comes down to the removal or mitigation of the anxiety of a particular person.

Horney did not think it justified to focus exclusively on childhood, resorting to a certain one-sided fascination with the beginning of human life. Neuroses, she believed, are generated not only by individual experiences of a person, but also by those specific conditions in which we live. She developed various strategies of interpersonal relations, fixing attention on the painful, neurotic states of people.

Karen Horney is the author of many popular books (Basic Conflict, Women's Psychology, Neurosis and Personal Growth, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Gender Relations, Neurotic Conflict Resolution, Introspection, Anxiety). Karen Horney's work is written in good, easy language. They are always logical and consistent.

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Women's psychology. Karen Horney

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K's views. Horni on the psychology of women

Introduction

Karen Horney (1885-1952) is known not only as a prominent representative of neo-Freudianism (a trend that arose as a result of growing dissatisfaction with orthodox psychoanalysis), but also as the author of her own original theory, as well as one of the key figures in the field of female psychology.

She is the only female psychologist whose name is listed among the founders of the psychological theory of personality.

Karen Horney got her start by being the first woman in Germany to be allowed to study medicine. She ended up founding the American Institute of Psychoanalysis.

The psychologist and psychoanalyst Karen Horney, like Adler, Jung, Erickson and Fromm, followed the fundamental principles of Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, but later chose her own path in depth psychology.

The most important point on which she disagreed with Freud was the crucial role of physical anatomy in determining psychological differences between women and men.

Horney believed that Freud's statements about the psychology of women, especially his claims that women are driven by unconscious "penis envy", are illogical and tied to the culture of 19th century Vienna. Horney also objected to his theory of instincts and neurosis and believed that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy should adhere to a broader sociocultural orientation.

In her writings, Horney emphasized the importance of cultural and social influences on the individual. Horney's three main considerations served as the impetus for the formation of a sociocultural view of personality.

First, as a female psychologist, she rejected Freud's statements about women, and especially his assertion that their biological nature predetermines penis envy and a tendency to stress, neurosis, and depression. This was the starting point for her departure from the orthodox Freudian position.

Secondly, during her stays in Chicago and New York, she exchanged opinions with such eminent scientists as Erich Fromm, Margaret Mead, and Harry StackSullivan. Thanks to them, her conviction was strengthened that sociocultural conditions have a profound influence on the development and functioning of the individual.

Thirdly, clinical observations of patients receiving psychological assistance, whom she managed as a psychotherapist in Europe and the United States, showed striking differences in their personality dynamics, which was a confirmation of the influence of cultural factors. These observations led her to conclude that unique styles of interpersonal relationships underlie personality dysfunctions.

Also noteworthy are her reflections, which show an optimistic view of humanity, based on the belief that every person has the capacity for positive personal growth.

The relevance of the study lies in the fact that Horney's theoretical and clinical ideas have a huge response, and not only among counseling psychologists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. She wrote extensively specifically for people without professional training in this field, and her books are very popular today.

Thus, Horney's approach to personality is not only of historical interest.

The object of the study is the psychological teaching of Karen Horney.

The subject of the research is Karen Horney's scientific views on the psychology of a woman.

The objectives of the study are to analyze Karen Horney's views on the psychology of women.

Research objectives:

1. Describe the life path of Karen Horney.

2. To reveal the essence of K. Horney's theory of personality.

3. To analyze the main components of the psychology of a woman K. Horney.

Research methods - analysis of literary sources.

1. Prerequisites for the formation of Karen Horney as a psychoanalyst

1.1 Biography of Karen Horney

horney psychoanalyst complex female

The future celebrity - a psychologist, an experienced psychotherapist and a famous psychoanalyst - Karen Horney (KarenHorney), nee Danielson, was born in Germany, near Hamburg in 1885. Her father was a sea captain, a deeply religious man, convinced of the superiority of men over women. Her mother, Clotilde Ronzelen, Danish, attractive and free-thinking, was 18 years younger than her husband and had a free-thinking mind that her daughter certainly inherited.

In her youth, Karen accompanied her father on long sea voyages, where she acquired a passion for travel and distant lands. Therefore, the realization that she could not become a sea captain like her father (“she could not be with her father”) was a painful experience for young Karen, she met these experiences more than once with her patients.

But her decision to pursue medicine—already at the age of 14, Horney had made the decision to become a doctor—not an ordinary choice for a woman in the early twentieth century—was influenced by her mother.

The goal was reached in 1906 when she entered the University of Freiburg and became the first woman in Germany to be allowed to study medicine.

For most of Horney's childhood and adolescence, he was tormented by self-doubt, exacerbated by a sense of outward unattractiveness, depression, and neurosis. She made up for her sense of worthlessness by becoming an excellent student. She later admitted, "Because I couldn't be beautiful, I decided to be smart."

At university she met Oscar Horney, a political science student who became a prominent lawyer, and she married him in 1910.

After graduating from the University of Berlin (1913) as the best student in the group, Horney specialized in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Horney received her medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1915.

For the next five years, she studied psychoanalysis (which its founder Sigmund Freud was actively developing at the time) and psychotherapy at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Almost all this time, Horney suffered from stress and severe bouts of depression, and once, according to her biographers, was saved by her husband while attempting suicide.

By 1926, Horney's marriage began to unravel as the avalanche of her personal problems grew. The sudden death of her brother, the divorce of her parents and their death within one year, the growing doubts about the value of psychoanalysis - all this led her to a completely depressed state (close to neurosis, when she herself needed the help of a psychologist).

After living with her husband for twenty-eight years and raising three daughters, in 1937, due to differences in interests, Karen eventually divorced her husband, and from that time devoted herself entirely to the psychoanalytic movement.

However, even before her divorce from her husband in 1927, she had begun a successful career in psychotherapy (as a psychiatrist). She worked at the Berlin Psychiatric Institute and was very passionate about teaching, scientific writing and travel.

Undoubtedly a talented physician and researcher, Horney became a doctor of medicine at twenty-eight, and by thirty she was already one of the recognized teachers of the newly opened Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Already one of her first articles "On the origin of the castration complex in women" brought her European fame.

K. Horney went through personal analysis with Hans Sachs, one of the closest associates of 3. Freud and the founder of the first Psychoanalytic Committee (1913), and she received the qualification of a teaching analyst from Karl Abraham, whom 3. Freud considered his most capable student.

Psychoanalytic training and personal analysis in such faithful followers of Freud, it would seem, should have contributed to an unconditional adherence to the ideas of classical psychoanalysis.

However, Horney, almost from her first works, begins to actively polemize with the creator of psychoanalytic theory, and it must be admitted that in a number of cases this polemic was quite productive.

The reason for this unexpected "confrontation" is most clearly revealed by Horney herself. In 1926, in The Departure from Femininity, she wrote: “Psychoanalysis is the work of a male genius, and almost all who developed its ideas were also men. It is natural and natural that they were focused on studying the essence of male psychology and understood more in the development of a man than a woman. It is difficult to disagree with this reproach, as well as with the fact that only a differentiated approach to male and female psychology opens the way to the development of a philosophy of a holistic personality.

Holism or "philosophy of integrity", where the objective and the subjective, the material and the ideal are combined, formed the basis of all Horney's conceptual approaches.

In many ways, K. Horney went to the creation of the science of female psychology in a similar way. It was F. Alexander who, in 1932, invited Karen Horney to Chicago as deputy director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.

It was already the second psychoanalytic institute in the USA. The first was opened in 1930 in New York. Dr. Sandor Rado (1890-1972) was invited from Berlin to lead it, bringing with him the spirit of orthodoxy and tradition that existed at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.

F. Alexander adhered to broader views and in many ways contributed to overcoming the isolation of psychoanalysis and its arrival in universities and colleges in the United States.

After working together for about two years, Alexander and Horney recognized that their further collaboration was impossible, since each had his own path.

K. Horney leaves for New York, where in 1941 he organized the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and later became the founding editor of the American Psychoanalytic Journal. She owns dozens of studies, articles and books, among which the most famous are The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and Women's Psychology.

In 1932, during the Great Depression, Horney moved to the United States. She was accepted to the position of Assistant Director at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Two years later, she moved to New York, where she lectured at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and provided psychological assistance to patients as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst. The growing divergence of her views from Freud's doctrine forced the staff of the institute to disqualify her as an instructor in psychoanalysis in 1941. Soon after, she founded the American Institute of Psychoanalysis. Horney served as dean of the institute until her death from cancer in 1952.

1.2 Sociocultural theory: main conceptual provisions

Karen Horney's three main considerations influenced the formation of a sociocultural view of personality psychology.

First, she did not accept, and ultimately rejected, the statements of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, regarding women, especially his assertion that their biological nature predetermines unconscious penis envy. This was the starting point in her divergence from orthodox psychoanalysis.

Secondly, through close contact with scientists such as Erich Fromm, Margaret Mead, and Harry StackSullivan, her conviction was strengthened that sociocultural conditions have a deeper influence on the development and functioning of the individual, on the formation of neurosis and depression, than was postulated in classical psychoanalysis.

Thirdly, her clinical practice has demonstrated striking differences in the personality dynamics of her patients, confirming the influence of cultural factors. These observations led her to conclude that unique styles of interpersonal relationships underlie personality dysfunctions.

Horney acknowledged Z. Freud's statement about the importance of childhood experiences for the formation of the structure and functioning of an adult's personality: “Z. Freud's greatest achievement is the postulate according to which there is no fundamental difference between pathological and “normal” phenomena, that pathology is only more distinct, like under a magnifying glass shows the processes taking place in all people.

But, despite the commonality of this and some other basic positions, both scientists disagreed on the issue of the specifics of personality formation.

Horney did not accept Freud's statements about the existence of universal psychosexual stages and that the sexual anatomy of the child unconsciously dictates a certain direction for the further development of the personality. According to her beliefs, the decisive factor in the development of personality is the social relationship between the child and parents.

According to Horney, childhood is characterized by two needs: the need for satisfaction and the need for security. Satisfaction covers all the basic biological needs: food, sleep, etc., but they do not play the main role in the formation of personality. The need for security is central to a child's development. In this case, the underlying motive is to be loved, desired, and protected from a dangerous and hostile world.

In meeting this need for security, the child is completely dependent on his parents.

If parents show true love in relation to the child, then his need for security is satisfied, forming a healthy personality.

Conversely, if the behavior of the parents interferes with the satisfaction of the need for security, pathological development of the personality is very likely.

Moments in parental behavior that frustrates the child's need for security: erratic, erratic behavior, ridicule, broken promises, overprotectiveness, and showing a clear preference for his siblings.

But the main negative, destructive for the personality, result of such ill-treatment by parents is the development in the child of an attitude of basal hostility (according to Horney, “basal mistrust”). In this case, the child finds himself in an ambivalent situation: he depends on his parents and at the same time feels resentment and indignation towards them.

This conflict "launches" such a defense mechanism as repression.

As a result, the behavior of a child who does not feel protected in the parental family is determined by a sense of his own powerlessness, feelings of fear, love, hatred towards parents and guilt for this hatred, which acts as a psychological defense, the purpose of which is to suppress hostile feelings towards parents in order to survive. Often this leads the child to depression.

According to the psychoanalytic understanding of the phenomenon of transference, repressed feelings of resentment and hostility, which are caused by parents, are manifested in all relationships of the child with other people, both now and in the future. In such a case, it is said that in the psychology of the child there is basal anxiety, "a feeling of loneliness and helplessness in the face of a potentially dangerous world."

Basal anxiety - an intense and pervasive sense of insecurity - is one of Horney's fundamental concepts.

Unlike Freud, Horney did not believe that anxiety is a necessary component in the human psyche. On the contrary, she argued that anxiety arises as a result of a lack of security in interpersonal relationships. All that in relationships with parents destroys the child's sense of security, leads to basic anxiety. Accordingly, the etiology of neurotic behavior must be sought in the disturbed relationship between the child and the parent.

If a child feels love and acceptance of himself, he feels safe and is likely to experience healthy development.

To cope with the feeling of insecurity, helplessness and hostility inherent in basal anxiety, the child is forced to resort to various defensive strategies. Horney described ten such strategies, called neurotic needs, or neurotic tendencies.

These are the needs:

- in love and approval, manifested in an unsatisfied desire to be loved, to be an object of admiration from others; in increased sensitivity and susceptibility to criticism, rejection or hostility towards people who are critical (or perceived as such).

- Managing Partner. At the same time, there is an excessive dependence on others and a fear of being rejected or left alone; overestimation of love, because there is a conviction that love can solve everything.

- in clear restrictions, i.e., a preference for a lifestyle in which restrictions and established order are of paramount importance; undemanding, contentment with little and submission to others.

- in power, i.e., dominance and control over others as an end in itself; a contemptuous attitude towards weakness, for which softness, pliability, loyalty, tolerance and other human qualities are taken.

- exploiting others. This results from the fear of being used by others or the fear of looking "stupid" in their eyes, but the unwillingness (inability, impossibility) to do something to outwit them.

- in public recognition - the strongest desire to be an object of admiration from others, when the idea of \u200b\u200boneself is formed depending on social status.

- in self-admiration. The desire to create an embellished image of oneself, devoid of flaws and limitations; the need for compliments and flattery from others.

- in ambition. A strong desire to be the best, regardless of the consequences; fear of failure.

- in self-sufficiency and independence. Avoiding any relationship that involves the assumption of any obligations; distancing from everyone and everything.

- in impeccability and own infallibility. Trying to be morally infallible and blameless in every way; maintaining an impression of perfection and virtue.

Horney argued that these needs are present to one degree or another in all people. Their satisfaction helps to cope with the feelings of rejection, hostility and helplessness that are inevitable in life.

However, the neurotic, reacting to various situations, is not able to receive satisfaction from each of them. He is able to satisfy only one of all possible needs. This is what neurotic "sharpness" is all about.

A healthy person, on the other hand, freely replaces one need with another if changing circumstances require it, satisfies one need after another, and if one cannot be satisfied, then the satisfaction of another brings the same effect, not allowing one to feel frustrated and unhappy.

So, a neurotic, unlike a healthy one, chooses some one need, the satisfaction of which only allows him to feel comfortable in all social interactions, which ultimately leads him to stress: “If he needs love, he must receive it from friend and foe, employer and shoe shiner." The need of a neurotic definitely has a neurotic character if a person tirelessly tries to turn its satisfaction into a way of life.

Horney later identified three main categories of needs, each of which represents a strategy for optimizing interpersonal relationships in order to achieve a sense of security in the world around. In other words, their action should lead to a decrease in the level of anxiety and the achievement of a more or less satisfying life. Each strategy is accompanied by a certain orientation in relations with other people.

Orientation to people (compliant type) involves a style of interaction that is characterized by dependence, indecision and helplessness. The person Horney refers to as the accommodating type is driven by an irrational unconscious belief: "If I acquiesce, they won't touch me."

The compliant type needs to be needed, loved, protected, and led. Such people enter into relationships with the sole purpose of avoiding feelings of loneliness, helplessness, or worthlessness. However, their courtesy may hide a repressed need to behave aggressively. Although such a person seems to be embarrassed in the presence of others, keeping a low profile, hostility, anger and rage are often hidden under this behavior.

The compliant type described in the literature is Molchalin from "Woe from Wit" by A. Griboyedov.

Orientation away from people (separate type) as a strategy for optimizing interpersonal relationships is found in those individuals who adhere to the defensive attitude: "I don't care." The people that Horney refers to as a separate type are guided by the erroneous belief: "If I step back, I will be all right."

The detached type is characterized by an attitude not to be carried away in any way, whether it is a love affair, work or leisure. As a result, they lose their true interest in people, get used to superficial pleasures - they just go through life dispassionately. This strategy is characterized by the desire for privacy, independence and self-sufficiency.

A large number of modern people can be attributed to this type - from marginals (homeless people) and informals ("Goths", "emo") to fanatics of computer games and social networks, who are incapable of communicating off-line.

Orientation against people (hostile type) is a style of behavior that is characterized by dominance, hostility and exploitation. A person of the hostile type acts on the basis of an illusory belief: "I have power, no one will touch me."

The hostile type is of the opinion that all other people are aggressive and that life is a struggle against everyone. By this he justifies his own hostility: “I do not attack, but I defend myself. They started first! He considers any situation or relationship from the position: “What will I get from this?”, Regardless of what it is about - money, prestige, contacts or ideas. Horney noted that the hostile type is able to act tactfully and friendly, but his behavior in the end is always aimed at gaining control and power over others. Everything is aimed at increasing one's own prestige, status, or satisfying personal ambitions. Thus, this strategy expresses the need to exploit others, to receive public recognition and admiration.

From Horney's point of view, these fundamental strategies in interpersonal relationships are used by each of us at some time. Moreover, these strategies are in constant conflict with each other, both in a healthy and neurotic personality.

However, in healthy people this conflict does not carry such a strong emotional charge as in patients with neuroses. A healthy person is characterized by great flexibility, he is able to change strategies according to circumstances. And the neurotic is not able to make the right choice between these three strategies when he solves the questions that confront him or builds relationships with others. He uses only one of the three coping strategies, whether it works or not. Thus, a neurotic, in comparison with a healthy person, behaves less effectively in solving life problems.

2. Karen Horney's views on the psychology of women

Karen Horney disagreed with many of the statements of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, regarding women.

She completely rejected his view, according to which women unconsciously envy the male penis and reproach their mothers for being deprived of this organ.

She also considered Freud's opinion erroneous, who claimed that a woman unconsciously seeks to give birth to a son and thus symbolically gain a penis.

Horney explained the fallacy of such statements by the fact that psychoanalysis was created by "a male genius, and almost all who developed the ideas of psychoanalysis were men."

The result of disagreement with the official theory is Horney's disqualification as a personal psychoanalyst and exclusion from the ranks of psychoanalysis.

However, Horney achieved more than just a critique of Freud. She created her theory of the psychology of women, containing a new look at the differences between men and women in the context of sociocultural influences.

Horney, drawing on her clinical practice, argued that women often feel inferior to men because their lives are based on economic, political, and psychosocial dependence on men.

In the "men's world" in which we live, women were treated (often still treated) as second-class creatures, not recognizing the equality of their rights with the rights of men and brought up to accept male "superiority".

Male-dominated social systems constantly make women feel dependent and inadequate.

Horney argued that many women strive to become more masculine, but not out of penis envy. She saw women's "overvaluation" of masculinity more as a manifestation of a desire for power and privilege: "The desire to be a man can express a desire to have all those qualities or privileges that our culture considers masculine - such as strength, courage, independence, success, sexual freedom the right to choose a partner.

Horney also drew attention to the role contrasts that many women suffer in relationships with men (up to the development of depression or neurosis), highlighting in particular the contrast between the traditional female role of wife and mother and the more liberal role of choosing a career or achieving other goals. . She believed that this role contrast explained the neurotic needs that we can see in women in love relationships with men.

2.1 Relation to the castration complex

Karen Horney's views on the psychology of a woman have undergone significant changes in the course of her work, ranging from full support for the theory of psychoanalysis by Z. Freud to its deep rethinking and processing.

Thus, in the Report at the VII International Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin in September 1922 “On the origin of the castration complex in women,” Horney demonstrates his complete adherence to the views of orthodox psychoanalysis on the problem of castration: “... our understanding of the nature of this phenomenon has not changed significantly. Many women, both in childhood and in adulthood, periodically or even constantly experience suffering associated with their gender. The specific manifestations of the mentality of women, arising from the protest against the fate of being a woman, originate from their childhood longing for their own penis. The unacceptable idea of one's original deprivation in this respect gives rise to passive fantasies of castration, while active fantasies are generated by a vindictive attitude towards a man who is in a privileged position.

But already in this report, there is a theme of doubt, even some kind of disagreement with the official point of view on the problem: “... it is accepted as an axiom that women feel flawed precisely because of their genitals. Perhaps, from the point of view of male narcissism, everything here seems too obvious ... Nevertheless, the overly bold assertion that half of humanity is dissatisfied with their gender and can overcome this discontent only in especially favorable conditions seems completely unsatisfactory, and not only from the point of view of the female narcissism, but also biological science."

Horney asks the question, the search for an answer to which throughout her life led her to create a psychology of women different from the psychology of men: is it really a castration complex found in women, which can lead not only to the development of neurosis, but is a threat to healthy character formation or even the entire future fate of women (quite normal, capable of any practical activity), is based solely on the unsatisfied desire to have a penis? Or is this just a pretext behind which other forces are hidden, the dynamic beginning of which is familiar from the mechanism of the formation of neuroses?

Horney does not just ask this question, although the very posing of such a question is dangerous for orthodox psychoanalysis. Horney offers to answer this question, and offers several methodological approaches, one of which (ontological), in her opinion, is clinical practice.

So, examining the often occurring desire of his patients to urinate like a man, Horney sees the reason for such a desire not in the castration complex, but in the feeling of injustice that is born from gender inequality in society: “... it is especially difficult for girls to overcome the desire to masturbate, as they feel that, because of their difference in body build, they are unfairly prohibited from doing what boys are allowed to do.... the difference in body build can easily lead to a bitter sense of injustice, and thus the argument later used to justify the rejection of femininity (namely, that that men enjoy greater sexual freedom) appears to be conditioned by genuine early childhood experiences.

Thus, Horney says that in a society where some features of an individual (anatomical structure, defects in anatomy or physiology, specific behavior, etc.) can become the basis for socio-cultural prohibitions, these very features can serve as the basis for the formation personality structures. With the removal of these prohibitions, the personality structure can be formed in a different way.

To paraphrase the words of Karen Horney herself (of "American Indian girls and little Trobriand girls"), one might wonder if there is a desire to urinate like a man in little girls, for example, Mongolians, whose cultural customs and peculiarities in clothing allowed them (in Karen's time) Horney, anyway) to send their natural needs as openly (and also directly) as to men?

Thus, already at the beginning of his psychoanalytic career, Horney begins to doubt the correctness of the applicability of psychoanalytic maxims to women without taking into account the peculiarities of female psychology.

In the future, her conviction that it is impossible to approach the assessment of the characteristics of the psychology of a woman from the point of view of male psychological teaching.

Being already a mature psychologist, Horney formulates the main prerequisites for the further development of the psychology of a woman by her followers (by the way, not only female psychologists, but also men):

1. The situation of the "oedipal complex" takes place, but as a special case. The relationship of the sexes is a field of many general, special and individual problems that cannot be reduced to any one formula.

In the days of matriarchy, law and custom were centered around the mother and the "matricides" were then (as Sophocles and other ancient authors testify) a more serious crime than parricide. In the era of the invention of writing, a man began to play a leading role in politics, economics, legislation and sexual morality. There were many reasons for this. One of them, probably, is that a man is more rational, more capable of depersonalizing himself, "socializing his psyche." But this is also his weakness, his inconsistency with modernity, which again emphasizes the importance of a holistic, individualized personality. The woman again enters the struggle for equality.

2. A man honors a woman like a Mother who feeds, cares, sacrifices herself. The life-giving power of a woman fills men with admiration. But "it is disgusting for a human being to feel admiration and not hold a grudge against one whose abilities one does not possess." A man envies a woman and seeks to compensate for his inability to bear children by creating a state, religion, art. Therefore, the whole culture bears the imprint of masculinity.

By opposing gender equality, “male culture” infringes on women in many ways. Motherhood is poorly protected by law. Pregnancy and child rearing, which require huge physical and mental costs from a woman, and are the main reason for the “cultural lag” of a woman, are almost not compensated in any way. There is an indulgence of the sexual irresponsibility of men and the relegation of a woman to the role of a sexual object.

3. Another reason for distrust and even hostility between the sexes is that a man is afraid of a woman as a sexual being. In many African tribes, men believe that women have magical powers over their genitals. A man is also inclined to think that a woman takes away his strength during sexual intercourse, takes his life-giving seed for herself. The attitude towards a woman is associated with the fear of death: whoever gives life has the right to take it away.

This mystical fear was confirmed by the unprecedented destruction of women under the banner of the fight against witches (“Hammer of the Witches”), whose only fault was that the men themselves lusted for women and could not resist this lust (“Notre Dame Cathedral” by V. Hugo ).

4. A man is more dependent on a woman than she is on him. He is afraid not to satisfy the woman, to be impotent, to humiliate himself in front of her. The sexuality of a woman scares him more than attracts him. He would rather have the woman just be a sexual object. For a long time, any sexual activity on the part of a woman was considered a deviation, and frigidity was considered the norm. For the unhindered satisfaction of his sexual desires, a man must keep a woman in a state of obedience, in other words, in slavery, which is what takes place in everyday life and the public economy.

In the mythological fantasy, a man would like to see a woman "immaculate", devoid of sexual desires, only in this case she is completely safe for him. Apparently, the cult of the Virgin Mary is connected with this. The debasement of the feminine principle is also evident in the story of Adam and Eve. For some reason, Eve was made from Adam's rib, and not Adam comes from Eve's body. A woman in the Old Testament is interpreted as a temptress and seducer.

5. Distrust and hostility towards a man are also present in the female psyche, but they are usually associated with childhood experiences. The "Paradise of Childhood" that forgetful adults often talk about is nothing more than an illusion. A girl is more disadvantaged in her childhood than a boy. More is forbidden, less is allowed. She develops a sense of guilt and fear of physical force in childhood. This is eloquently evidenced by the dreams of girls, in which female fear arises when meeting with snakes, wild animals, monsters that can defeat her, take possession of her, break into her body. The girl intuitively feels that her future does not depend on her, but on someone else, on a mysterious event that she is waiting for and afraid of. Trying to avoid these experiences, the girl goes into the "male role". This is especially noticeable between the ages of four and ten. During puberty, noisy boyish behavior disappears, giving way to girlish - belittled and appropriate social role, which is often considered dangerous and undesirable.

Thus, Horney convincingly argues that the price of accepting a female role is a greater propensity for neuroticism than that of men. Sometimes - ambition, the desire for power, the desire to "take the whole man." Sometimes - emphasized modesty, passivity - as if they just didn’t think that she wants something from a man. Finally, frigidity common among women.

2.2 Female masochism

One of the most controversial views of Karen Horney can be recognized as her views on the problem of female masochism.

December 26, 1933 In Washington, DC, Horney makes a presentation at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, in which, by her own admission, she brings up for discussion a problem that "affects the very foundations of the definition of a woman's place in culture." That problem is masochism.

Horney gives evidence that in European culture the masochistic phenomenon is more common in women than in men.

There are two approaches to explaining this observation. The first is an attempt to find out whether masochistic tendencies are not inherent in the feminine nature itself. The second is to assess the role of social conditions in the origin of differences between the sexes in the frequency of masochistic tendencies.

Prior to Horney, psychoanalytic literature considered the problem only from the point of view of female masochism as a psychic consequence of the anatomical difference between the sexes. Psychoanalysis thus provided its scientific apparatus to support the theory of an ancestral kinship between masochism and the female organism. The possibility of social conditioning from a psychoanalytic point of view was not considered before Horney.

Horney sets himself and the psychoanalytic community the task of trying to uncover the correlation of biological and cultural factors in this problem, as well as to consider the validity of the psychoanalytic data available on this score and to ask whether the psychoanalytic method can be used to investigate the possible social conditioning of this phenomenon.

Orthodox psychoanalytic ideas are as follows:

The specific satisfaction that a woman seeks and finds in sexual life and in motherhood is of a masochistic nature;

The deep content of early sexual desires and fantasies relating to the father is the desire to be mutilated, that is, castrated by him;

Menstruation has the hidden meaning of experiencing a masochistic experience;

In the sexual act, the woman secretly strives for violence and cruelty, or - mentally - for humiliation;

The process of childbearing gives her an unconscious masochistic satisfaction, as well as maternal duties towards the child;

If a man is characterized by masochistic fantasies or actions, this is an expression of his subconscious desire to play the role of a woman.

As a result, an unattractive and disappointing situation for a woman develops: either accept her female role and receive dubious masochistic satisfaction, or try to get away from her female role, achieving masculinity, but as a result, lose herself as a woman without the certainty that she will be accepted as an ersatz- men by men.

Helen Deutsch assumed the existence of a genetic factor of a biological nature, which inevitably leads to a masochistic concept of the female role.

Sandor Rado pointed to an inevitable circumstance that directs sexual development along a masochistic channel.

The difference of opinions manifested itself in only one thing: whether the special female forms of masochism represent a deviation in the development of a woman, or are they a “normal” female attitude.

According to psychoanalytic theory, masochistic tendencies are much more common in women than in men. Consequently, if the majority of women, or all of them, are masochistic in their attitude to sexual life and reproduction, then in non-sexual areas, masochistic tendencies will inevitably manifest themselves much more often in them than in men.

Horney does not argue that women can seek and find masochistic satisfaction in masturbation, menstruation, intercourse, and childbearing. The question is how often this happens, and why it happens, that is, in the prevalence of the phenomenon.

According to Freud, a turning point in female development occurs when a girl realizes that she does not have a penis. It is assumed that the shock of this discovery will affect her for a long time. For such an assumption, Freud had two sources of data: the desire to have a penis revealed in the analysis of neurotic women or the fantasies that they once had one; and observations of little girls expressing a desire to have a penis too when they discover that boys have one.

For the author of psychoanalysis, these observations were enough to build a working hypothesis that masculine desires of one origin or another play a role in female sexual life, and such a hypothesis was used to explain some neurotic phenomena in women.

Horney diplomatically hints that this is a hypothesis, not a fact, and that even as a hypothesis it is not indisputable. Moreover, there is no evidence to support the claim that the desire for masculinity is a dynamic factor of paramount importance not only in neurotic women, but in any woman, regardless of her personality and place in culture, there is no data.

Due to the limited historical and ethnological information, almost nothing is known about mentally healthy women and about women living in different cultural environments.

Thus, in view of the lack of data on the frequency, causality, and specific weight of the observed reaction of girls to the opening of the penis, the very assumption that this is a turning point in female development is suggestive, but not proof.

Horney asks, "Why should a girl turn into a masochist when she discovers she doesn't have a penis?"

According to H. Deutsch: “The active sadistic libido, until then tied to the clitoris, is reflected from the barrier of the subject’s inner awareness of the absence of a penis ... and is reflected most often in a regressive direction, towards masochism. This leap towards masochism is "part of the female anatomical destiny".

Sadistic fantasies in young children are the only confirmation of this assumption. This fact is directly observed in the psychoanalysis of neurotic children (which M. Klein points out) and is reconstructed in the psychoanalysis of adult neurotics.

But the point is that there is no evidence for the generality of these early sadistic fantasies. Horney quipped that it is not known whether they are present in American Indian girls and little Trobriand girls.

1. That these sadistic fantasies are generated by an active-sadistic cathexis of the libido of the clitoris.

2. That the girl refuses to masturbate on the clitoris due to narcissistic trauma after discovering the absence of a penis.

3. That the libido, active-sadistic until now, automatically turns inwards and becomes masochistic.

All three assumptions appear to Horney to be highly speculative. It is known that a person can be frightened by his own hostility and therefore prefer a suffering role, but how the cathexis of the libido of an organ can be sadistic and then turn inward - for Horney this remains a mystery.

Helen Deutsch studied the genesis of femininity, by which she understood "the feminine, passive-masochistic character of the mentality of women." Her conclusions: masochism is the main component of the female mentality.

Horney has no doubt that this is often the case when it comes to neurotic women, but the hypothesis that this is psycho-biologically inevitable for all women is unconvincing.

Further analysis of psychoanalytic views on female masochism, carried out by Horney, convincingly shows that the observations made on neurotic women cannot be recklessly extended to all women, since the observations themselves do not mean anything - the main thing in their interpretation: what is acceptable "... to explain some neurotic reactions is unlikely to be useful when working with normal children or adults."

Since masochism is the ability to derive pleasure from such things that cause pain, humiliation, fear, etc., Horney talks about the principle of pleasure: “The principle of pleasure implies that a person seeks to derive pleasure from any situation, even when there are not only maximum opportunities for this. , even when the possibilities are scanty. Two factors are responsible for the normal course of such a reaction:

1) the high adaptability and flexibility of our desire for pleasure, noted by Freud as a characteristic of a healthy person, in contrast to a neurotic and

2) an automatically implemented process of reconciling our unbridled desires with reality, as a result of which we realize or unconsciously accept what is available to us and what is not.

The process of checking with reality is slower in children than in adults, but a girl who loves her rag doll, although she may ardently desire a magnificently dressed princess from a window, will nonetheless have fun playing with hers if she sees that she can never get that beauty. .

A man who has a normal sex life and is suddenly imprisoned under such severe supervision that all means of sexual satisfaction are closed will become a masochist only if he had masochistic tendencies before.

A woman abandoned by her husband, deprived of a source of immediate sexual satisfaction and expecting nothing in the future, may react masochistically, but the more healthy balance she has, the easier she will endure temporary deprivation and find pleasure in friends, children, work, or other joys of life. A woman will react masochistically to such a situation only if she has previously shown a tendency to masochistic behavior.

Horney says ironically that if one follows the line of reasoning of an orthodox psychoanalyst, one should only be surprised that boys do not turn into masochists. Almost every little boy gets the opportunity to notice that his penis is smaller than that of an adult male. He perceives this as the fact that an adult - a father or someone else - can get more pleasure than himself. The idea of giving someone more pleasure should poison their enjoyment of masturbation. He should quit this job. He must suffer severely mentally, and this will excite him sexually, he will accept this pain as a surrogate pleasure and from then on will be a masochist. The absurdity of this happening all over the place with boys is obvious. Why should this happen to girls, and even without fail?

Finally, even assuming that the opening of the penis causes the girl severe suffering; that the idea of the possibility of greater pleasure spoils the impression of what is available; that mental pain excites her sexually and she finds in this a surrogate sexual pleasure, we must ask: what prompts her to seek satisfaction in suffering constantly?

Horney sees this as a discrepancy between cause and effect. A stone that has fallen to the ground will remain lying until it is moved. A living organism, traumatized in some situation, will adapt to new conditions. The long-term nature of the efforts to defend themselves is not questioned, considering that the forces motivating this once arisen desire to defend themselves remain unchanged.

Freud vigorously emphasized the durability of childhood impressions; but, however, psychoanalytic experience also shows that emotional reactions that took place in childhood persist for life only if they continue to be supported by various dynamically important circumstances.

Why are male psychoanalysts so sure that a woman almost always has to be a masochist?

Horney wittily answers this question: the reason is the fear of men themselves of a woman and her biological capabilities: “This is ... a mistake that psychiatrists and gynecologists made: Kraft Ebing, observing that male masochists often play the role of suffering women, speaks of masochism as about the kind of excessive strengthening of feminine qualities; Freud, starting from the same observation, suggests the existence of a close connection between masochism and femininity; the Russian gynecologist Nemilov, impressed by the suffering of a woman during defloration, menstruation and childbirth, speaks of the bloody tragedy of a woman; German gynecologist Lipman, under the impression of how often women get sick, get into accidents, experience pain, suggests that vulnerability, irritability and sensitivity are the main triad of female qualities. Unable to understand (read: feel) how a woman can endure this and not suffer forever after that, men attribute their own suffering to women.

According to Freud, there is no fundamental difference between pathological and "normal" phenomena, that pathology is only more distinct, as under a magnifying glass, it shows the processes that take place in all people.

This principle expands our mental horizon, but it also has limits of applicability.

In the study of female masochism, the same principle was used. Manifestations of masochism in women are discovered as a result of observation even where they might otherwise go unnoticed: in the social encounters of women (completely outside the scope of psychoanalytic practice); in the depiction of a female character in literature; when studying women who adhere to some customs alien to us, such as Russian peasant women, who, according to the national proverb, do not feel that their husband loves them if he does not beat them. In the face of such evidence, the psychoanalyst comes to the conclusion that he is faced with a universal phenomenon operating on a psychoanalytic basis with the constancy of the law of nature.

One-sidedness or a positive error in the results is often due to the neglect of cultural and social conditions, in particular, due to the exclusion from the general phenomenology of women living in a different civilization with different traditions.

The Russian patriarchal peasant woman under the tsarist regime is constantly referred to in disputes to prove how deeply masochism has grown into female nature. However, this peasant woman today has turned into an assertive Soviet woman who will undoubtedly be surprised if beatings are talked about as a declaration of love. The change has taken place in the culture, not in the personality of women.

Generally speaking, wherever the question of the frequency of a phenomenon arises, it implies the sociological aspects of the problem. The refusal of psychoanalysts to deal with them does not exclude their existence. The lack of a sociological approach can lead to an incorrect assessment of the significance of anatomical differences and their transformation into the cause of a phenomenon that is actually partly or even completely socially determined.

According to Horney, only the synthesis of both conditions will provide a complete picture of the nature of the phenomenon. The problem of female masochism cannot be attributed only to the peculiarities of the anatomical, psychological and mental characteristics of a woman, but must be considered as largely determined by the culture or social environment in which a particular female masochist developed.

Conclusion

horney psychoanalyst complex female

Karen Horney is an amazing woman. She writes about such details that take place in the soul of a neurotic person, which many simply do not know about. Her books are unique in their accurate depiction of conflicts.

Horney Karen. Books online

Karen Horney (1885 1952) is known not only as a prominent representative of neo-Freudianism (a trend that arose as a result of growing dissatisfaction with orthodox psychoanalysis), but also as the author of her own original theory, as well as one of the key figures in the field of female psychology.

She is the only female psychologist whose name is listed among the founders of the psychological theory of personality.

Karen Horney became the first woman in Germany to receive permission to study medicine. She ended her career by founding the American Institute of Psychoanalysis.

This book is about conflicts that most of us experience to one degree or another. “From time to time, our desires, interests, beliefs necessarily collide with the interests, desires and beliefs of other people.

And just as such clashes between us and the environment are ubiquitous, in the same way, conflicts within us are an integral part of human life, ”writes Horney.

The last and most famous book of an outstanding psychoanalyst is devoted to the study of internal problems and personality conflicts. Summarizing his many years of clinical experience, the author formulates ideas about neurosis as a specific variant of adaptation, competing with the spiritual development of the personality.

The book is available not only to professionals, but also to a wide range of readers who can not only recognize themselves in them and see their own problems, but also ways to overcome them.

The works of K. Horney are written in a very intelligible and simple language and therefore are quite accessible even to an unprepared reader.

The reason for rethinking Freud's theory in that part of it, which inevitably explained the nature of neuroses by the action of only instinctive and genetic factors, was, according to K. Horney herself, her dissatisfaction with therapeutic results during the fifteen-year medical practice.

An analysis of the causes of these failures made me take a fresh look at the problems of patients, first to assume, and then to affirm the idea that the environment, living conditions can not only modify, but also shape the character, provoke the development of neurotic conflicts.

For psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, educators and anyone interested in psychology and personality development.

Reader Comments

Nothing can save me, but thanks to Horney, I found out what I'm dying from.

Karen Horney is the guardian angel and patroness of all neurotics, her work is a guiding star for them.

It was her books that helped me understand the very vicious circles, the mechanisms that triggered this process. I am eternally grateful to Karen Horney. For several years after many years of torment and torment, I live a happy and fulfilling life. She is truly a genius!

Lecture 23. Sociocultural theory of personality by K. Horney.

Neurotic needs and orientations.

Karen Horney (1885 - 1952), an eminent female psychoanalyst, entered the history of psychology as the author of an original theory of personality in which she analyzes the sociocultural factors that determine the development of the child. Like W. Reich, Horney largely disagreed with the point of view of orthodox psychoanalysis on the problems of human mental development; like Reich, she was denounced by the psychoanalytic community for her differences (disqualified as an instructor in psychoanalysis in 1941). The disqualification failed to prevent Horney from further developing his theory. She founded the American Institute of Psychoanalysis and served as its first dean until her death.

There are several main provisions that are the basis of the sociocultural theory of K. Horney. Firstly, she rejected the ideas of Z. Freud regarding the psychology of a woman, especially his assertion that penis envy is the leading factor in female psychological development. Secondly, her interactions with a number of prominent psychologists and anthropologists (E. Fromm, M. Mead, G.S. Sullivan) led her to the idea that sociocultural conditions have a profound effect on the development and functioning of the individual. Clinical observations of the patients she treated in Europe and America showed significant differences in their personal dynamics, which was a confirmation of the influence of cultural factors on personality development. These observations led her to conclude that unique styles of interpersonal relationships underlie personality dysfunctions.

Personal development. K. Horney supported Freud's main ideas regarding the decisive role of childhood experiences for the formation of the structure and functioning of an adult's personality. However, regarding the specifics of personality formation, their opinions differed. Horney did not accept Freud's statement about the existence of universal psychosexual stages and that the child's sexuality dictates a special direction for the further development of the personality. According to her beliefs, the decisive factor in the development of personality is the social relationship between the child and his parents.

According to Horney, the child has two basic needs: the need for satisfaction and the need for security. Satisfaction includes all biological needs: food, sleep, and so on. Horney recognized that the satisfaction of this basic need plays an important role in the child's physical survival; however, she believed that another basic need plays a leading role in the formation of personality - security. The need for security implies the desire to be loved, desired and protected from the dangers of the world around. In satisfying this need (however, as in satisfying the first basic need), the child is completely dependent on the parents. If parents show true love and warmth in their relationship to their child, then they satisfy his need for security. This contributes to the formation of a healthy personality. On the contrary, if the behavior of the parents does not contribute to the satisfaction of the need for security, pathological development of the personality is possible.

Failure to meet the need for security leads to the child's feelings of resentment and anger towards parents (basal hostility). This feeling comes into conflict with the child's dependence on parents. As a result of this conflict, negative feelings are repressed. But even when repressed, basal hostility affects the child's psyche, filling it with feelings of helplessness, fear, love and guilt. This complex of feelings is called basal anxiety (a feeling of loneliness and helplessness in the face of a potentially dangerous world).

Etiology of neurosis. Unlike Freud, Horney did not believe that anxiety is a necessary mental state. She believed that anxiety arises as a result of a lack of security in interpersonal relationships. According to Horney, pronounced basal anxiety in a child leads to the formation of neurosis in an adult. To cope with a sense of lack of security, helplessness and fear of the outside world, the child resorts to various protective strategies. Expressed in behavior, these strategies "orient" a person to achieve, "acquire" something, so Horney also used the term neurotic needs to describe them. Horney described 10 such strategies/neurotic needs.

The need for love and approval is manifested in a constant insatiable desire to be loved and to receive admiration from others. Associated with increased sensitivity and susceptibility to criticism, which can be regarded as rejection and hostility.

The need for guidance is expressed in excessive dependence on other people and fear of rejection (in close relationships) or loneliness. Associated with an overestimation of love and the belief that love can solve all problems.

The need for restrictions is expressed in the preference for clear instructions and restrictions, reassessment of the role of order in life. Associated with undemanding in relation to the conditions of life, contentment with little, the desire to obey.

The need for power is expressed through dominance and the desire to control the actions of others as an end in itself; contempt for human weaknesses.

The need to exploit others is expressed in the fear of being used by others or the fear of looking stupid in their eyes. At the same time, unlike the cases of the “norm”, there are no attempts to change oneself or the situation.

The need for public recognition is expressed in the desire to be the object of admiration of other people; self-esteem is overly dependent on social status.

The need for self-admiration is expressed in the desire to create an embellished image of oneself, devoid of flaws and limitations. Associated with the need for compliments and flattery from others.

The need for ambition is expressed in a strong desire to be the best, regardless of the consequences; associated with the fear of failure.

The need for self-sufficiency and independence is expressed in the avoidance of any relationship that involves any obligations, distancing from people.

The need for impeccability and irrefutability is expressed in constant attempts to be morally infallible and impeccable in all respects, the desire to maintain the impression of infallibility and perfection.

Horney believes that these strategies are present in all people. They help us deal with life's inevitable frustrations and disappointments, feelings of hostility and rejection and helplessness. But, if a healthy person easily replaces one strategy with another in a changed situation, then a neurotic seeks to implement only one of the available strategies, and in all emerging social situations. That is, we can say that a strategy/need is neurotic if the person turns its satisfaction into a way of life.

Horney divided this list of needs into three more general categories. Each of these categories represents a strategy for optimizing interpersonal relationships; each is aimed at reducing feelings of anxiety and achieving a sense of security. Each strategy corresponds to a certain orientation in relations with people.

Orientation to people (compliant type) suggests dependence, indecision and helplessness as a style of relationship. Such a person needs to be needed, loved, protected and led. The purpose of the relationship they enter into is to avoid feelings of loneliness and uselessness. However, under the guise of courtesy and dependence, suppressed hostility, the desire to behave aggressively, may be hidden.

Orientation from people (separate type) is characterized by a lack of interest in people, detachment, avoidance of close interpersonal relationships. Such people are characterized by a desire for solitude, independence and self-sufficiency.

Orientation against people (hostile type) is a style of behavior that is characterized by dominance, hostility towards other people and the desire to exploit them. Life is seen as a struggle of all against all. All behavior is aimed at increasing one's own prestige, status, or satisfying personal ambitions.

Like neurotic needs, these interpersonal orientations are used to varying degrees by each person in different life situations. However, as in the previous case, a healthy person is able to flexibly change orientations in accordance with changing circumstances and depending on his goals. The neurotic cannot make a choice adequate to the situation and tends to use only one of the available orientations. Moreover, both in a healthy person and in a neurotic, these orientations are in conflict with each other. However, in healthy people this contradiction does not carry such an emotional charge as in neurotics, thanks to the flexible use of all three orientations. In neurotics, it becomes the basis of the basal conflict.

Basic conflict. The basal conflict of the neurotic lies in the contradictions in the relationships that he develops with other people. This conflict is generated by incompatible types of orientations that form the core of the neurosis. Let me remind you that the orientations of the neurotic are inflexible, do not correspond to the changing situation; one of the orientations is regularly used, the others are suppressed.

The person tries to overcome this conflict using different ways. Firstly, he can suppress certain aspects of his personality, actualizing the opposite features of the suppressed ones. Secondly, a person can create such a distance between himself and other people that will not allow conflict to arise. Thirdly, a person can create an idealized image of himself, which will be perceived as a real "I". An idealized image gives real self-confidence and real pride. The next option to avoid the basic conflict is its externalization (perception of internal processes as if they took place outside the person), the projection of one's own shortcomings, and the transfer of responsibility for relationships to other people. Other options for avoiding conflict are selective “blindness” regarding the most obvious contradictions, the fragmentation of life into separate parts, the strictest self-control, etc.

The consequences of unresolved basal conflicts can be fears. One of the most common is the fear of destruction of protective formations (fear of insanity, death, etc.). Other types of fears associated with basal conflict are fear of exposure (defensive ploys), fear of self-change, and so on. Fears form obstacles to the resolution of the basal conflict and the integration of the personality, therefore, in the treatment of neuroses, Horney believed, it is necessary to work with the patient's fears.

Another consequence of the unresolved basal conflict is “impoverishment of the individual”. Horney meant by this term feelings of weakness, indecision, emptiness, internal tension, alienation from one's own "I", etc. This leads the patient to a decrease in sincerity and an increase in egocentrism.

K Horney psychology of woman

New Ways in Psychoanalysis is Karen Horney's boldest and therefore perhaps most infamous work, costing her membership in the American Psychological Association for attempting to question the infallibility of orthodox psychoanalysis. The reason for rethinking Freud's theory in that part of it, which inevitably explained the nature of neurosis by the action of only instinctive and genetic factors, was, according to K. Horney herself, her dissatisfaction with therapeutic results during the fifteen-year medical practice.

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Returning forgotten names. On the origin of the castration complex in

It was F. Alexander who, in 1932, invited Karen Horney to Chicago as deputy director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. It was already the second psychoanalytic institute in the USA. The first was opened in 1930 in New York. Dr. Sandor Rado (1890–1972) was invited from Berlin to lead it, bringing with him the spirit of orthodoxy and tradition that existed at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.

F. Alexander adhered to broader views and in many ways contributed to overcoming the isolation of psychoanalysis and its arrival in universities and colleges in the United States.

After working together for about two years, Alexander and Horney recognized that their further collaboration was impossible, since each had his own path. K. Horney leaves for New York, where in 1941 he organized the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and later became the founding editor of the American Psychoanalytic Journal. She owns dozens of studies, articles and books, among which the most famous are "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" and "Female Psychology", which will make up the first two books of the series "Psychoanalytic Literature Library" published by us.

I have already mentioned the reason for such a long journey to the Russian reader, but here I consider it appropriate to note that the Russian Psychoanalytic Institute was created twenty years earlier than the American one, but by the time these books appeared, both the Institute and the publication of the Psychological and Psychoanalytic libraries under the editorship of the director of the Institute, Professor I. D. Ermakov, were already liquidated, of course, as a "stronghold of bourgeois ideology", and many outstanding scientists-analysts who received world recognition were repressed, including physically destroyed. In 1942, Professor Ivan Dmitrievich Ermakov also died in the Butyrka prison, undoubtedly a talented clinician, scientist and organizer, whose merits to Russian science and culture have not yet been duly appreciated.

The reopening of our Institute, the resumption of the systematic training of analysts, research and publishing activities became possible only in 1991.

I will not follow a fairly common tradition and retell the content of specific chapters in the introduction, and even more so, give an assessment of them, leaving this to the reader. Although, I must admit, I do not agree with the author in everything. But I think it would be dishonest to enter into polemics with him: the book was written too long ago, and too much has changed during this time both in ourselves, and in culture, and in psychoanalysis.

At first, I made quite a lot of footnotes, but then, realizing that it was impossible to put all the foundations of psychoanalytic knowledge into notes, I abandoned unnecessary comments, focusing solely on trying to preserve the originality of the author's language and searching for adequate Russian equivalents. Here, after completing work on the Russian text of the book, I would like to make only one more, but, as it seems to me, extremely important note. When starting to read the book, one must constantly remember that, just like Freud, when presenting psychopathological complexes, describing states and drives that do not yet have definite language equivalents, the author quite often resorts to metaphor. I will now try again to explain and illustrate this. When you say to your interlocutor: “And then I just exploded,” it would never occur to any normal person to identify what was said with a real physical process.

In the same way, psychoanalytic terms in the vast majority of cases cannot be directly correlated with the ordinary meanings of the words or combinations that form them, but only generally and conventionally characterize those “somatic experiences”, the mental equivalents of which are extremely diverse. The perception of the Oedipus complex only as an incestuous desire is the lot of wild psychoanalysis and unfortunate analysts. And here I would like to emphasize once again that the half-understood ideas of psychoanalysis are much more dangerous than complete misunderstanding.

A lot of people were involved in the work on this book - artists, proofreaders, editors, typesetters and printers, each of whom deserves gratitude. But I would like to express my special gratitude to the translator, a student of our Institute, Elena Ivanovna Zamfir, who not only took on the task of preparing the Russian version of the book (initially, as a term paper), but also really contributed to its publication, showing sincere interest, perseverance and enviable patience in contacts with scientific editors.

I also hope that the publication of this book will give an additional impetus not only to new approaches to the treatment of functional disorders, but will actually contribute to the formation of a new self-awareness of the modern Russian woman.

This book, called by the author "Women's Psychology", of course, is about men too. And I am sure that reading it will not go unnoticed by both sexes, and, therefore, will allow them to better understand each other, or rather, take at least another half step towards the unattainable ideal of mutual understanding.

IN THIS PLACE YOU CAN CHEAP LINKS TO YOUR RESOURCES

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov - Twelve chairs

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin

Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart of a Dog

Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace

Mikhail Lermontov - Hero of our time

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo

Anton Chekhov - Stories

Margaret Mitchell - Gone with the Wind

William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet

Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers

Erich Maria Remarque - Three Comrades

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Idiot

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust

Alexander Griboyedov - Woe from Wit

Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre

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Mikhail Sholokhov - Quiet Don

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Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea

Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons

Ivan Goncharov - Oblomov

JK Rowling - Harry Potter Book Series

Jerome D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

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Alan Alexander Milne - Winnie the Pooh

Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Patrick Suskind - Perfumer. The story of a killer

Erich Maria Remarque - Arc de Triomphe

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Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

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Boris Vasiliev - And the dawns here are quiet.

Nikolai Gogol - Taras Bulba

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles

Nikolai Gogol - Auditor

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

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Colin McCullough - The Thorn Birds

Jack London - Martin Eden

Leonid Filatov - About Fedot the archer, a daring young man

Boris Akunin - The Adventures of Erast Fandorin

George Orwell - 1984

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - It's hard to be a god

Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago

Vladimir Vysotsky - Nerv

Jerome K. Jerome - Three men in a boat, not counting the dog

Stendhal - Red and black

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game

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Alexander Pushkin - Belkin's Tales

Mikhail Bulgakov - White Guard

Miguel Cervantes - Don Quixote

Alexander Pushkin - The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish

Ivan Bunin - Dark alleys

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Monday starts on Saturday

Mark Twain - The Prince and the Pauper

Alexander Belyaev - Amphibian Man

Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

Edgar Poe - Stories

Erich Maria Remarque - Borrowed Life

Theodore Dreiser - An American Tragedy

Evgeny Schwartz - Ordinary Miracle

Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon

Gavriil Troepolsky - White Bim Black Ear

Yaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Schweik's Adventures During the World War

Alexei Tolstoy - Peter I

Stanislav Lem - Solaris

William Shakespeare - King Lear

Anton Chekhov - Ward No. 6

Jules Verne - Captain Fifteen

Sergei Yesenin - Anna Snegina

Victor Dragunsky - Deniska's stories

— The quality of a book requires certain qualities from the reader (Leonid Leonidov)

- The phrase "books have their own fate" means that books taken for reading are not returned back (Don Aminado)

- The best of books are those that give the most food for thought (Anatole France)

A bestseller is a book that sells well because it already sells well (Daniel Boorstin)

- In me, and not in the writings of Montaigne, what I read in them is contained (Blaise Pascal)

- All good books are similar in one thing - when you read to the end, it seems to you that all this happened to you, and so it will remain with you forever (Ernest Hemingway)

- The main thing that reading books teach us is that very few books are worth reading (Henry Louis Mencken)

- Cheap books are uncivilized, books should be expensive, this is not vodka (Vasily Rozanov)

- Bad books can spoil us just as bad comrades (Henry Fielding)

- If a book becomes a world bestseller, it only proves that the Earth is not round, but flat (Aldous Huxley)

Every book is a steal from one's own life. The more you read, the less you know how and want to live by yourself (Marina Tsvetaeva)

Books are funny portable bits of thought (Susan Sontag)

- Books truly have the ability of immortality - they are the most durable fruits of human activity (Samuel Smiles)

- Book publishing - an auction of the human mind (Emily Dickinson)

- When books are burned on fires, their meaning becomes clear even to the illiterate (Daniil Rudy)

- The best service a book can do you is not only to tell the truth, but also to make you think about it (Elbert G. Hubbard)

- We, in essence, learn from those books about which we are not able to judge. The author of a book about which we can judge should have learned from us. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe)

- An undoubted sign of any good book - if you like it the more the person gets older (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

“Just think, to learn living feelings, living thoughts from dead matter — from rags and printing ink! (George Bernard Shaw)

- Buying books just because they are published by a famous author is the same as buying a suit that does not fit at all just because it is sewn by a famous tailor (Alexander Pop)

- Those who compile collections of poems or witticisms are like people who treat themselves to cherries or oysters: first they choose the best, then they gobble up everything (Nicolas Sebastian Chamfort)

- Someday everything will have its end - a distant day, which I will no longer see - then my books will be opened and I will have readers. I have to write for them, for them I have to finish my main ideas. Now I can't fight - I don't even have opponents. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

One of the main merits of Karen Horney is the analysis of female psychology and attempts to introduce such a phenomenon as introspection into psychoanalysis. This book covers both topics. However, I would put the topic of female psychology in the first place, because. Karen Horney is one of the few female psychoanalysts who can approach this subject more objectively. Yes, and we must not forget that Freud himself at one time said that he could not understand female psychology exactly, despite the fact that the vast majority of patients (or first patients) were women. Based on this, the opinion of a female psychoanalyst on female psychology is of particular value.

The book consists of articles written by the author at different times, and in some cases, these are reports from various psychological conferences.

At the very beginning of the book, Horney refers to the philosophical essay of Georg Simmel, whose meaning is that all the social institutions that surround us were created by men and predominantly for men, and from this it follows that it is especially difficult for a woman to adapt to these institutions due to the fact that that they weren't made for her. This important thought will become the main idea of Horney's entire book. And indeed, if you look closely, you can see that a lot was created by the hands of men and with the idea that it was the man who would use it (politics, the army, art, laws, morality, religion, science, etc.).

As if moving away from this idea, but not far, Horney turns to Freud and to psychoanalysis, which is also a predominantly male field of activity created by a man. Horney refers to Freud's conclusion about women, namely that women have so-called penis envy. Horney gives the following table.

The naive assumption that girls, like boys, have a penis

Both sexes attach importance only to the male genitalia

Awareness of the absence of a penis in girls

The woeful discovery of the absence of a penis

The idea that a girl is a crippled castrated boy

Castration is seen as an act of punishment

The certainty that the girl was subjected to a punishment that threatens him

The girl is viewed as an inferior being

The girl treats herself as a lower being. penis envy

The boy cannot imagine that the girl will ever be able to get over her loss and overcome envy.

The girl cannot overcome the feeling of her own inferiority and inferiority, and she has to constantly struggle with the desire to be a man.

The boy is afraid of her envy

A girl all her life wants to take revenge on a man because he has what she is deprived of.

As you know, most neuroses grow out of childhood events, therefore, the discovery in early childhood of the fact that girls do not have what boys have causes enormous damage to the psyche, which is a springboard for the development of certain neuroses already in adulthood. In this table, Horney shows the stages through which each child goes: awareness, search for causes, reaction, conclusions (as I understand it).

Based on the above, Freud believed that "the desire to have a child grows only out of envy of the penis and disappointment due to its absence, and that tender affection for the father arises only in this roundabout way - through the desire to have a penis and the desire to have a child." And "in cases of a favorable development of a woman, this narcissistic envy of the penis is almost completely dissolved in the object-libidinal desire of a man and a child."

Horney believes that because of these two factors - "masculine civilization" and the absence of a woman's penis - another reaction may also occur: flight from the female role, from femininity or, as Horney writes, "the girl seeks refuge in the imaginary role of a man."

In explaining this attitude, Horney quotes Simmel: "the great social importance ascribed to a man is probably due to his superiority in strength." As Horney writes, roughly speaking, we have a relationship of a slave and a master, because “one of the privileges of the master is that he does not need to constantly remember that he is the master, while the slave can never forget his fate.” This is said in the context of women constantly addressing the issue of gender, injustice towards women, discrimination and possible or not possible equality. And as is clear from the above quote, men never think about whether they have the right to engage in this or that business (even such professions as a gynecologist). And, continuing this semantic thread, we can, together with Karen Horney, come to the conclusion that it is much easier for men to achieve sublimation in this world than for women, also because "all ordinary professions were designed for men." Awareness of this state of affairs leads a woman to abandon her role, and this very often, according to Horney, takes the form of frigidity. However, many may have the feeling that a woman who is dissatisfied with her role and considers herself flawed cannot be completely normal sexually. However, as Horney writes, “In reality, at a deeper level, what we encounter is not a rejection of sex in general, but rather a rejection of a specific female role,” which can often be observed in today's reality. That is why frigidity is often masked so well that neither others nor the partner notice it. And only indirect signs can speak of the presence of a “female masculinity complex”.

What is such a setting? Horney gives this description of such women: “At the same time, we see how the same woman, who treats all men, nevertheless recognizes their superiority. She does not believe that women are capable of achieving anything real, and rather tends to share a man's disrespect for them. If she is not a man, then at least she will support their judgment of women. Often, such an attitude is combined with clearly pronounced discrediting tendencies towards men, which involuntarily resembles the well-known fable about the fox and the grapes. Indeed, one can often observe such women who resemble half-men, or more accurately, a caricature of men, because they try their best to act and think like men, but in reality it has either a comical or tragic appearance and resembles something of self-torture. Not a single normal man will complete anything about his gender, let alone defend purely feminine attitudes (opinions, labels) in relation to men.

However, frigidity can also come from another source. As is known from Freud's psychoanalysis, at the very beginning of his life, the child develops Oedipal attitudes towards parents, who, after a certain period of life, are sent to an outside family object. However, in cases of unfavorable mental development of the child, such a change of object may not occur, and then, as Horney writes, it may happen that “The superego is in danger of reviving the old prohibition of incest - this time in relation to the marriage partner; and the more fully unconscious desires are realized, the greater this danger" and leads to the fact that "direct sexual goals give way to attachment relationships that impose a prohibition on sexual goals." As I understand it, this means that it is necessary to distinguish between two frigidities: the first comes from the refusal of the female role, the second due to fixation on one of the parents, as a result of which the replacement of the role of the spouse by the role of the father is manifested.

It is very common to find women with the so-called "mother's mindset", which is a modified version of the second mindset mentioned above. The bottom line is that women of this type play the role of mother, they seem to say, as Horney writes: “In my relationship with my husband, I should not play the role of wife and mistress, but exclusively the role of mother with all the loving care and responsibility that this entails.” This type of woman was beautifully portrayed by Nobel Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck in The Lost Bus, in which a mother-wife arrives at a gas station hotel with her husband and daughter. In the novel, she completely leveled all her husband's sexual stimuli, eventually reducing them to zero, turning family relations into a quiet hell, the way out of which was found at the end of the novel by the husband himself in the form of the actual rape of his wife. True, in such cases, is it possible to say that this gave rise to the transformation of a wife-mother into a wife-lover? Whatever answer is given, in any case it is clear that in both situations, family life turns into forced exile, into prison, and the only way out of this situation is divorce.

Of particular interest is the chapter-article "Distrust between the sexes". In particular, Horney writes the following: “A man's fear of a woman is deeply rooted in sexuality, as evidenced by the simple fact that a man is afraid only of sexually attractive women, whom, no matter how passionately he desires, he tries to keep in obedience. Older women, on the other hand, are given the greatest respect even in cultures where young women are feared and therefore repressed.” Indirect examples can be found in the Bible when a woman seduces a man and thereby makes him taste an apple. You can also find this in the aphorism “Have you ever heard that a woman would ever go crazy with a man’s legs” and in almost all literary works in which, most often, a man loses his head, i.e. does not act according to his own mind, in relation to a beautiful woman. So, Horney's conclusion is confirmed by all areas of the arts.

Further, Horney gives examples when this fear is especially noticeable: “during menstruation, a woman is surrounded by the strictest taboo - a man who touches her will die (I think there is a kind of fear due to transference, i.e. a woman during menstruation is perceived as a castrated man , or Freud's explanation of taboo, where a person who has touched a taboo himself becomes a taboo); The Arabs of Mecca do not admit women to religious festivities, in order to exclude close relations between them and their overlords; in Bengal it is forbidden for women to eat tiger meat, lest they become too strong.”

In any case, both then and now, and in developed civilizations and not very developed ones, women are treated “if not with undisguised hatred, then with ostentatious friendliness.” The installation was the same as that of the fascists in relation to the Jews, who could be good people, but as the fascist philosopher Lessing said: "the Jew must burn." Therefore, it is not surprising that "a devout Jew thanks the Lord that he did not create him a woman" or, as Asians candidly say, "she is a second-class creature." Horney's list of "other" attitudes towards women is quite large, although less than Freud's.

As already said, all this applies to young or better to say sexy women, and does not apply to the elderly. In addition to the elderly, Horney adds - and this is quite understandable from the point of view of Freud and the Oedipus complex - "motherhood as an expression of certain spiritual qualities of a woman: a selfless mother-nurse, for this is the ideal embodiment of a woman who could fulfill all the expectations and desires of a man" . Such an attitude can also be explained by the fact (in addition to the fact that a pregnant wife is associated with a man’s mother) that a woman with a child is no longer perceived as a dangerous woman who can deceive a man and run away to another, but on the contrary, she already begins to depend on a man due to the fact that the offspring needs the protection of a man. As Freud wrote: “As for the woman, she, not wanting to part with her defenseless cubs, should have remained with a stronger man in their interests.”

Continuing to refer to Freud, it should be noted that Horney refers to the analysis of savage tribes. Thus, defining a man's fear of a woman as "fear directed against her as a sexual object", Horney gives an interesting observation of the Arunta tribe, according to which "they believe that a woman is able to magically affect the male genitals (i.e. this is the very fear of castration) . Actually, this is very similar to what I have suggested only in relation to women during menstruation and the fear of men in relation to this.

Another interesting fact is that a woman is very often associated with death: “in African fairy tales, it is the woman who brings death into the world. The great mother goddess also brought death and destruction." And as Horney so aptly puts it: “It seems that we are possessed by the idea that the one who gives life is also able to take it away.” True, there is the problem of a sexual woman. After all, the mother goddess is not always depicted as a young, attractive, desirable girl, but as Karen Horney noted above, there is a man's fear of a sexually attractive woman. Therefore, further Karen Horney asks the following question: "Is it not because men are vitally interested in keeping women dependent that a man is more sexually dependent on her than she is on him?" I think the answer is yes. I do not know what biologists say, but most likely this is the case and the analysis of wild tribes says exactly this.

In the next article-chapter, Horney deals with the topic "The Problems of Marriage". As mentioned above, frigidity can and certainly does create the prerequisites for failed marriages, divorces and "family hell". Explaining this problem, Horney compares marriage to an official who has “his position secured for life” as a result of which he ceases to be zealous, hone his skills, etc. This is not surprising. How often can one observe men and women who were completely different (both in a spiritual and physical sense) before marriage and how radically changed for the worse after marriage. And what is important, this is not related to either age or health, because. the same men and women who are not married, regardless of age, etc., maintain a "healthy spirit in a healthy (slim) body." Complementing this picture is what Horney writes about the renunciation of certain freedoms due to marriage: “Today there is only one known way to bridge the gap between law and happiness. It involves a change in our personal attitude towards an inward rejection of demands rather than desires. Whatever the impression may arise that the author denies the necessity of marriage, I must note that all of the above is not about the institution of marriage in general, but about unsuccessful marriage. This means that the presence of these problems is not necessary in a happy marriage.

Why do bad marriages happen? Here I think it will not be a secret to anyone that marriages are often made based on the situation (pregnancy of a partner) or mental problems (need for a new parent). However, there are other reasons as well. Here is what K. Horney writes about this: “Thus, the essential mistake of such a choice lies in the fact that it is made for the sake of the implementation of some particular condition. One single impulse, one single desire forcefully bursts into the foreground, obscuring everything else. A man, for example, may have an irresistible desire to call his girlfriend, which many other admirers seek.

Another factor that can create problems in a marriage is "fear of an impregnable woman." This is explained by the fact that “the care of the child is entrusted to the mother, it is from her that we receive not only warmth, care, tenderness, but also our earliest prohibitions.”

As we can see from the previous example and from all other examples, there is clearly a need to asexualize a woman so that, on the one hand, not to be afraid of some trick on her part, and on the other, to realize the need for a new mother who, as in childhood, will take care of this husband-child. On the one hand, women themselves can aspire to this role, because they believe that if a man is treated like a child, i.e. to satisfy and solve all his domestic and other problems and needs, then this will keep him from leaving the family or to the appearance of a mistress. However, this is not the case, because if such a wife was able to neutralize all his sexual stimuli, then he will look for the one that will directly satisfy him sexually (mistress or prostitutes).

In this context, the following idea by Karen Horney is interesting: "In extreme cases, it leads to the belief that a decent, respectable woman is asexual and to have sexual desire for her is to humiliate her." In literature (or cinema), this is best expressed by the hero of the mafia clan, who explains his attitude towards sexual relations with his wife and the presence of a prostitute with the following phrase: “And then, will she kiss our children with these lips?” I want to say right away that neither I nor psychoanalysis give an assessment to one or another sexual technique or method of satisfaction, because according to Freud, any method of satisfaction that does not directly lead to the continuation of offspring is a perversion, and as Freud himself writes, a “kiss” is the same perversion as any other sex (a way of sexual satisfaction) that does not lead to the birth of a child. Therefore, we can’t talk about any assessments, but we can and should talk about the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of one of the partners and the marriage as a whole.

Another feature of the appearance of fear or attitude in marriage is that the man is an active object, while the woman is predominantly a passive object, which means that there is “a man’s fear of being unable to satisfy a woman. He is afraid of her demands in general and her sexual demands in particular."

Quite often, the beginnings of this fear can be seen in childhood when "the little boy already felt like a man, but was afraid that his masculinity would be ridiculed and thereby damage his self-confidence when his boyish advances were ridiculed and rejected." Which, in turn, can affect the appearance of problems in marriage, when the husband feels that he is not able to satisfy his wife, and this in turn leads to "an instinctive desire to humiliate the wife, undermine her self-confidence." Let us add to this phrase Karen Horney the ideas expressed by another psychoanalyst E. Fromm, who in the book “The Soul of Man” writes about the types of aggression, among others there is the following type: “compensatory violence” - manifests itself as a result of impotence in a certain sphere important for a person. Then weakness is poured into a thirst for destruction. As Fromm writes, “he takes revenge on life for having cheated him.”

So, when a husband leaves for another woman or takes a mistress, this is a clear sign that not everything in the wife or husband is as the husband/wife would like. I do not know how true this is, but perhaps the presence of a mistress in some cases can be perceived from a positive point of view. In any case, having a mistress or lover "often brings more relief, satisfaction and happiness."

Karen Horney

Women's psychology

Foreword

F. Alexander adhered to broader views and in many ways contributed to overcoming the isolation of psychoanalysis and its arrival in universities and colleges in the United States.

The reopening of our Institute, the resumption of the systematic training of analysts, research and publishing activities became possible only in 1991.

Karen Horney's views on the psychology of women. Women's psychology Horney psychology of women

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1. Prerequisites for the formation of Karen Horney as a psychoanalyst

1.1 Biography of Karen Horney

horney psychoanalyst complex female

But her decision to pursue medicine—already at the age of 14, Horney had made the decision to become a doctor—not an ordinary choice for a woman in the early twentieth century—was influenced by her mother.

At university she met Oscar Horney, a political science student who became a prominent lawyer, and she married him in 1910.

After graduating from the University of Berlin (1913) as the best student in the group, Horney specialized in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Horney received her medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1915.

However, even before her divorce from her husband in 1927, she had begun a successful career in psychotherapy (as a psychiatrist). She worked at the Berlin Psychiatric Institute and was very passionate about teaching, scientific writing and travel.

K. Horney went through personal analysis with Hans Sachs, one of the closest associates of 3. Freud and the founder of the first Psychoanalytic Committee (1913), and she received the qualification of a teaching analyst from Karl Abraham, whom 3. Freud considered his most capable student.

Psychoanalytic training and personal analysis in such faithful followers of Freud, it would seem, should have contributed to an unconditional adherence to the ideas of classical psychoanalysis.

Holism or "philosophy of integrity", where the objective and the subjective, the material and the ideal are combined, formed the basis of all Horney's conceptual approaches.

In many ways, K. Horney went to the creation of the science of female psychology in a similar way. It was F. Alexander who, in 1932, invited Karen Horney to Chicago as deputy director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.

It was already the second psychoanalytic institute in the USA. The first was opened in 1930 in New York. Dr. Sandor Rado (1890-1972) was invited from Berlin to lead it, bringing with him the spirit of orthodoxy and tradition that existed at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.

F. Alexander adhered to broader views and in many ways contributed to overcoming the isolation of psychoanalysis and its arrival in universities and colleges in the United States.

1.2 Sociocultural theory: main conceptual provisions

Karen Horney's three main considerations influenced the formation of a sociocultural view of personality psychology.

If parents show true love in relation to the child, then his need for security is satisfied, forming a healthy personality.

This conflict "launches" such a defense mechanism as repression.

Basal anxiety - an intense and pervasive sense of insecurity - is one of Horney's fundamental concepts.

To cope with the feeling of insecurity, helplessness and hostility inherent in basal anxiety, the child is forced to resort to various defensive strategies. Horney described ten such strategies, called neurotic needs, or neurotic tendencies.

- in love and approval, manifested in an unsatisfied desire to be loved, to be an object of admiration from others; in increased sensitivity and susceptibility to criticism, rejection or hostility towards people who are critical (or perceived as such).

- Managing Partner. At the same time, there is an excessive dependence on others and a fear of being rejected or left alone; overestimation of love, because there is a conviction that love can solve everything.

- in clear restrictions, i.e., a preference for a lifestyle in which restrictions and established order are of paramount importance; undemanding, contentment with little and submission to others.

- in power, i.e., dominance and control over others as an end in itself; a contemptuous attitude towards weakness, for which softness, pliability, loyalty, tolerance and other human qualities are taken.

- exploiting others. This results from the fear of being used by others or the fear of looking "stupid" in their eyes, but the unwillingness (inability, impossibility) to do something to outwit them.

- in public recognition - the strongest desire to be an object of admiration from others, when the idea of ​​\u200b\u200boneself is formed depending on social status.

- in self-admiration. The desire to create an embellished image of oneself, devoid of flaws and limitations; the need for compliments and flattery from others.

- in ambition. A strong desire to be the best, regardless of the consequences; fear of failure.

- in self-sufficiency and independence. Avoiding any relationship that involves the assumption of any obligations; distancing from everyone and everything.

- in impeccability and own infallibility. Trying to be morally infallible and blameless in every way; maintaining an impression of perfection and virtue.

Horney argued that these needs are present to one degree or another in all people. Their satisfaction helps to cope with the feelings of rejection, hostility and helplessness that are inevitable in life.

However, the neurotic, reacting to various situations, is not able to receive satisfaction from each of them. He is able to satisfy only one of all possible needs. This is what neurotic "sharpness" is all about.

A healthy person, on the other hand, freely replaces one need with another if changing circumstances require it, satisfies one need after another, and if one cannot be satisfied, then the satisfaction of another brings the same effect, not allowing one to feel frustrated and unhappy.

Orientation to people (compliant type) involves a style of interaction that is characterized by dependence, indecision and helplessness. The person Horney refers to as the accommodating type is driven by an irrational unconscious belief: "If I acquiesce, they won't touch me."

The compliant type described in the literature is Molchalin from "Woe from Wit" by A. Griboyedov.

A large number of modern people can be attributed to this type - from marginals (homeless people) and informals ("Goths", "emo") to fanatics of computer games and social networks, who are incapable of communicating off-line.

Orientation against people (hostile type) is a style of behavior that is characterized by dominance, hostility and exploitation. A person of the hostile type acts on the basis of an illusory belief: "I have power, no one will touch me."

From Horney's point of view, these fundamental strategies in interpersonal relationships are used by each of us at some time. Moreover, these strategies are in constant conflict with each other, both in a healthy and neurotic personality.

2. Karen Horney's views on the psychology of women

Karen Horney disagreed with many of the statements of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, regarding women.

The result of disagreement with the official theory is Horney's disqualification as a personal psychoanalyst and exclusion from the ranks of psychoanalysis.

Horney, drawing on her clinical practice, argued that women often feel inferior to men because their lives are based on economic, political, and psychosocial dependence on men.

In the "men's world" in which we live, women were treated (often still treated) as second-class creatures, not recognizing the equality of their rights with the rights of men and brought up to accept male "superiority".

2.1 Relation to the castration complex

Karen Horney's views on the psychology of a woman have undergone significant changes in the course of her work, ranging from full support for the theory of psychoanalysis by Z. Freud to its deep rethinking and processing.

Horney does not just ask this question, although the very posing of such a question is dangerous for orthodox psychoanalysis. Horney offers to answer this question, and offers several methodological approaches, one of which (ontological), in her opinion, is clinical practice.

2.2 Female masochism

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Lecture 23. Sociocultural theory of personality by K. Horney.

K Horney psychology of woman

Karen Horney Psychology Women Fb2

- in public recognition - the strongest desire to be an object of admiration from others, when the idea of \u200b\u200boneself is formed depending on social status.