The Invented Self: Karen Horney's Theory Applied to Psychoanalysis in Groups* Part ll**

Patients in group therapy feel, in various ways, as unacceptable as a patient once did who felt in every glance and word the underlying hatred of her parents. Such patients cannot verbalize their feelings at first. But they long to do so. They struggle for an expression of feelings that they have previously denied. They begin to want to belong to this therapeutic group in a way that they were denied group-belonging years ago. The struggle to belong becomes apparent when there occurs an alignment of their respective idealized images for confronting each other, rather than presenting themselves to each other.

After the initial phase of the struggle for recognition (of their images), a phase of standoffs and standstills begins, and group members resort to silence. No one wants to talk and no one is inclined to give “an inch.” Some become bitter, some quietly disappointed, some look for redress. The question is, what are they wanting? Are they looking for redress for the unfairness of a childhood that deprived them of their chance for a spontaneously and humanely cherished existence? That is what we would like to believe. But, as was indicated in Part One, because of the development of the idealized self, that is not possible at this time; the person thus blocked is not aware of the terms and the conditions of that blockage.

The “child in us” has no way of knowing that it is looking to be wanted on that basis. What the patient seeks at this time is the redress of his self-image, a self-image that has neither been properly admired nor accepted as if it were a true self. The patient cannot know that his being is utterly inviolate from outside influences; no one but him can violate his being. No one “out there” can “put it down” or inflate it. Such influences can, however, induce him to take refuge in a false image of self, much to his loss and tragically for most of us, as our lives bear witness.

The patient cannot know that his true self is inviolate because the parental as