Horney's Metapsychology and Western Culture

Horney's psychoanalytic investigations drew attention to the incongruities and conflicts in the fabric of Western society. She maintained that although inheritance and personal experience account for individual variations in emotional disturbance, the conflicts themselves are “the same conflicts to which the healthy person in our culture is also subject.” Horney described three conflicts at the cultural level which she saw paralleling emotional conflicts at the individual level: the conflict between competitive success versus brotherly (Christian) love and humility; the conflict between stimulation of our needs versus factual frustration in satisfying them; and the conflict between the alleged freedom of the individual versus all his factual limitations.

Horney elected not to pursue her cultural investigations, feeling that “It would be the task of the sociologist to study and describe these cultural contradictions.”* Although a sociological perspective is undoubtedly useful, Horney's clinical theory itself provides a metastructure for the deeper understanding of these phenomena.

Underlying each of the sociological inconsistencies discussed by Horney is a fundamental philosophical issue. The compulsive urge to compete, the compulsive stimulation of needs, and the compulsive search for unlimited freedom are all based on an externalized static conception of man. Success becomes divorced from internal satisfaction, consumption from inner need, and freedom from personal authenticity. In each case, there is an idealization of the world divorced from the factual limits of reality.

Horney has described how, as a person idealizes himself, others, and the world, less and less of the resources and energy of his psyche are available to his real self. Idealizations, she states, have to be brought to awareness and confronted before the real self can begin