Guilt and Self-Idealization

In her work Neurosis and Human Growth (12), Karen Horney established her definitive concept of psychopathology as a disturbance of the growth of the self self and a process of falsification of the capacity for natural perception. She held the real self to be the live center belonging to every human being, a unique and personal core and the only thing that can grow and wishes to grow. When adverse conditions impede its development, a process of self-alienation sets in. The psychic energy becomes directed toward the formation and maintenance of appearances, the Pride System, which becomes autonomous and establishes its tyrannical destructive power over the individual. It represses his original character and creates an alien life-style that derives from the value system of his environment.

Contrary to Freud, Horney (10) did not consider neurotic conflict as an inevitable clash between the individual and his environment, because of being a function of his inherited instincts, but rather as a result of the falsification that he had to undergo in order to adapt to his defenseless position. The neurotic tendencies that represent precisely the system of adaptation to the environment become the essential component of the person's pathology, while replacing that person's true identity, which becomes permanently repressed. When we analyze this concept of psychopathology, we will find the most original aspects of Karen Horney's contributions to psychoanalytic theory, as well as the foundations that give meaning to her way of working.

In the first place, Horney believed that it is only the real self that is capable and desirous of growth, i.e., it constitutes the depository of the person's progressive tendencies. Horney and Fromm (8), as distinguished from Freud, believed that man's basic impulse is directed toward growth and toward life and not toward paralysis and death. Destructive tendencies do not emerge as a natural reaction, but as a developmental pathology, when the progre