Project, Process, and Change

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how Horneyan theory has guided both my individual and group therapeutic work during these past 30 years and how my clinical experience and the enrichment provided by my patients has integrated this theory.

A year before her death in 1952, Karen Horney very clearly expressed her own particular view of the individual in society. She sharply distinguished her school of psychoanalytic thought from others. She considered man to be a being capable of choice and responsibility rather than a creature invaded by instinct; a being that can change and grow throughout life. She saw anxiety not as an innate quality of human beings but as a reaction to situations in the individual's life, and always accompanied by hostility. The person is born with a vital necessity to realize himself. This is not a drive for self-destruction but a drive for life, and only when this drive is frustrated, when he is not able to be constructive, does he become destructive.

This approach shows us a positive vision of man right from the start, one of great faith in man's potentials, and above all, in his possibility to initiate change, to carry out projects, and we might even say, to become his own project.

The negative parts, then, the egocentric and asocial tendencies, are not seen as inevitable phases of the human process but as aspects of a neurotic process. Even narcissism is considered a secondary rather than a primary process. If he grows under favorable conditions, man call fully develop his innate constructive forces and potentials. Human nature is subject to transformation and change. The human being is originally free, a self that develops its own destiny in cooperation or in conflict with the forces that surround it. The constructive force in every human being originates in the fact that the individual contains, within himself, the capacity to change, maintaining that ideal form which is the self, in all its integrity.