A Psychological Critique of American Culture

Although Karen Horney's theories have been very valuable to me as a literary critic, they have been even more important to me as an analyst of history and culture. Even when performing basic literary analysis, as in “A Psychological Redefinition of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner,”1 I want to break out to tackle the broader issues: what are the effects of slavery on human beings? what is the effect of Styron's being white and Southern and male and modern on his creation of a nineteenth century black slave leader? Horney's discoveries often help answer such questions.

Indeed, I have found that she has discovered not simply The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, but perhaps the neurotic personality (with variations) of all times and cultures. Her usefulness in understanding literary characters is only a beginning. For example, looking at Richard Wright's Native Son from a Horneyan perspective reveals that Wright may have distorted the mimetic portrait of Bigger Thomas for the purpose of making a political and moral point. It seems unlikely that Bigger, a very oppressed expansive personality, would move so readily toward psychological health once he is captured, put on trial for murder and virtually certain to be executed. But this literary criticism of Wright is far less important than Wright's recognition in the novel and in its prefacing essay, “How Bigger Was Born,” of the plight of the expansive black male in American culture.2 Men are supposed to be expansive in American culture, but black men are not generally allowed to be. Black literature, when approached from a Horneyan perspective, inevitably cries out for cultural analysis.

Such analysis inevitably leads beyond Horney-to Maslow, of course, and other Third Force psychologists, and even to some of the findings of transactional analysis. Consider, for example, the somewhat oversimplified formulation