Contrasting Views Of Felt Aliveness

When psychoanalysts observe like phenomena in patients, their phenomenological reports tend to sound similar. However, their assessments and interpretations may be quite different. These latter expose their philosophical premises of human nature, the bases from which their theories flow. Karen Horney and Otto Kernberg are two psychoanalysts who have explored in depth the experienced lack of aliveness. They write about what they call, respectively, “the paucity of inner experiences” (Horney, 1952) and “the subjective experience of emptiness” (Kernberg, 1975). Their descriptions resemble one another. Their understandings of the determinants of these descriptions are compatible on superficial levels but ultimately are at variance with one another.

For Horney, the paucity of inner experiences comes about through the lowering of the threshold of awareness, which can be all-pervasive. It permeates the emotional life and encompasses thinking, willing, wishing, believing, and doing. It is an aspect of alienation from the actual self, an outcome of the neurotic process. Thus, while one may observe this diminished awareness in oneself, one is powerless to increase it at will. Its development occurs independent of character types. As it evolves, it sets other neurotic disturbances in motion. One must look outward for a substitute means of grounding oneself since inner experience cannot be relied upon. Externalized living, the experiencing of intrapsychic processes as interpersonal ones, ensues. The expectations of others, whether real or imagined, takes on the compelling quality of one's own “shoulds.” Rules, regulations, and routines may become road maps for self-orientation.

Appearing substitutes for being; what shows is what counts. Prestige becomes all-important as the views of others become the measure of one's own value. Thinking replaces being. One's thoughts take on the illusion of truth as the mind seems omnipotent, the seat of magical powers. These