Alienation in the Light of Karen Horney's Theory of Neurosis

I am in some conflict with the main title of this symposium, “Alienation and the Search for Identity.” The subtler implications of this title are that one has lost oneself and is trying to find it, like a long-absent relative. I submit rather that it never came into existence and, therefore, that there is nothing to be found. I am much more in harmony with Glenn Gray when he writes: “Paradoxical as it sounds, a severe struggle is required for most of us to become what we truly are. Certain psychologists like to refer to this incapability of becoming ourselves as self-alienation, but whatever we designate it the fact itself is there.”1 The self is not there to be found through searching, but something to be realized through struggle. For him “this struggle is best expressed in terms of an awakening, of coming to oneself, of becoming conscious of one's role in life. To help young people break through the surface of themselves and of society is a large part of education's permanent task. To educate is to civilize in depth our own children and others, rather than in the veneer of civilization earlier generations have achieved. How to reach that level where feeling and reason are fused and how to awaken this disposition to its relation to the rest of creation—this is the ancient but urgent problem of educating.”1 Alienation from self and the world can only be decreased through struggle. Gray sees it mainly in terms of education; we as therapists would see it mainly in the process of therapy.

Alienation has so many facets that it is often described in very different terminology. Ernest Van den Haag, in an article entitled, “Of Happiness and of Despair We Have No Measure,” calls it boredom. “The bored person,” he writes, “is lonely for himself, not, as he thinks, for others. He misses the individuality, the capacity for experience from which he is debarred. No distraction can restore it. Hence he goes unrelieved and insatiable.”2 While he sees the development of alienation