0.5 Karen horney and erich fromm  (Page 9/23)

A neurotic individual, simply put, is someone whose anxiety levels and behavior are significantly different than normal. What is normal, of course, can only be defined within a cultural context. Horney cited a number of famous anthropologists and sociologists to support this claim, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She cites H. Scudder Mekeel’s somewhat famous example of Native Americans having high regard for individuals who have visions and hallucinations, since those visions are considered to be special gifts, indeed blessings, from the spirits. This is in sharp contrast to the standard Western view, which considers hallucinations to be a symptom of psychosis. And yet, Native Americans are not fundamentally different than Westerners. Only one year after Horney’s book was published, Mekeel led Erik Erikson on the first of Erikson’s studies of Native American development, which led Erikson to conclude that his stages of psychosocial crisis were valid, since they seemed to apply to Europeans, European-Americans, and Native Americans. After citing many such examples, from simple matters such as preferred foods to complex matters such as attitudes toward murder, Horney concluded that every aspect of human life, including personality, was intimately tied to cultural factors:

It is no longer valid to suppose that a new psychological finding reveals a universal trend inherent in human nature…This in turn means that if we know the cultural conditions under which we live we have a good chance of gaining a much deeper understanding of the special character of normal feelings and attitudes. (pg. 19; Horney, 1937)

This emphasis on culture, however, should not be confused with the importance of individuality. Anxieties and neurotic symptoms exist within individuals, and present themselves within personal relationships. Culture, once again, merely guides the nature or form of those anxieties. In Western culture, we are driven primarily by economic and individual competition. Thus, other people are seen as competitors, or rivals. For one person to gain something, another must lose. As a result, according to Horney, there is a diffuse hostile tension pervading all of our relationships. For those who cannot resolve this tension, most likely due to having experienced the culturally determined anxieties in exaggerated form during a dysfunctional childhood, they become neurotic. Accordingly, Horney described the neurotic individual as “a stepchild of our culture” (Horney, 1937).

Interpersonal Strategies of Defense

Horney considered inner conflicts, and the personality disturbances they cause, to be the source of all psychological illness. In other words, calm, well-balanced individuals do not suffer psychological disorders (consider the stress-diathesis model of abnormal psychology). Although Freud approached this concept in his work, it was those who followed him, such as Franz Alexander, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, and Harald Schultz-Nencke, who defined it more clearly. Still, Horney felt they all failed to understand the precise nature and dynamics of character structure, because they did not take into account the cultural influences. It was only during her own work on feminine psychology that Horney came to the full understanding of these psychodynamic processes (at least, in her own view; Horney, 1945).