The Neurotic Personality of Our Time

The Neurotic Personality of Our Time sets out to describe neurosis as it actually appears in the consulting room, and to argue that its basic structure cannot be understood apart from the culture in which it arises. Horney holds that neuroses are produced chiefly by disturbances in human relationships rather than by instinctual drives unfolding on a fixed biological schedule, and she places at the centre of her account what she calls basic anxiety, the feeling of being small, helpless and isolated in a world experienced as hostile, which takes root when a child's need for warmth and security goes unmet. Against that anxiety, she argues, a person develops protective strategies which harden into the traits clinicians label neurotic. The book examines these in turn, among them the neurotic need for affection and approval, the striving for power, prestige and possession, the wish to dominate others, competitiveness and the fear of it, and the guilt feelings and inhibitions that accompany them. Horney connects these patterns to the cultural assumptions of modern Western life itself, which urges competition while preaching love of one's neighbour and stimulates wants while limiting the means of satisfying them, so that the neurotic person displays in sharpened form conflicts the culture presents to everyone.

Written from the publisher description, W. W. Norton.

What this vault takes from it

Reliability

Not audited here. 2 notes in this vault draw on it.

People

• Karen Horney