What is Basic in Human Nature

It Is An Honor, for which I am grateful, to give the Karen Horney Memorial Lecture in the year in which she would have reached her seventy-fifth birthday—despite a somewhat melancholy feeling, being seventy-five years old myself. When accepting the invitation I remembered the only public discussion Karen and I ever had, about her concept of “basic anxiety.” It is that discussion which has induced me to formulate the subject matter of this lecture, although much enlarging its scope. When one uses a term like basic anxiety one implies the existence of basic elements in the nature of man, and this again leads to the concept of a “basic nature of man.” It would certainly be important if such a basis for understanding the infinite variety of the expressions of human nature could be found. Although the search for it is never-ending, it is a task which must always be tried again—as I will try in my present speech.

The purpose of this lecture is threefold: First, I intend to discuss and defend the possibility of describing, in however preliminary and limited a fashion, a basic structure which characterizes man as man. Second, I want to emphasize that element in the basic nature of man which makes the variations, as well as the distortions, of human existence possible. Third, I will test the fruitfulness of my description by using it as a key for an understanding of important phenomena of human life.

The term “basic,” like most of our designations of matters mental and spiritual, is taken from spatial relations. It points to the difference between the relatively immovable and indispensable foundation of a building and the various possibilities the foundation gives for constructing the other parts of the building upon it. In analogy to this image, “basic anxiety” would be an anxiety which underlies all kinds of anxiety, and the basic nature of an individual or a group or of men in general would be a structure underlying all their self-expressions, however varied and contradict