Our Inner Conflicts

Horney's fourth book Our Inner Conflicts sums up, reconfigures, and expands all her previous work. In it she gives her most comprehensive description to date of character structure and neurotic development, not yet as elaborated as it would be in Neurosis and Human Growth , but in its essentials a fully worked-out theory. She sees neurotic trends now not as isolated tendencies but as what she calls “contradictory sets” of attitudes and values that are present within all individuals and that engender conflicting needs that are rigid, insatiable, and indiscriminate. This understanding of how neurotic trends engender inner conflicts leads her to formulate the concept of the idealized image, a concept that would become the linchpin of her theory of neurotic development.

The idealized image is conceived here as one of four solutions to inner conflict that enable individuals to feel unified and whole. But Horney saw already that the idealized image is probably the most important of the solutions by reason of its far-reaching effect on the whole personality. The idealized image has been called the child and parent of neurotic development. In Our Inner Conflicts, Horney shows how the idealized image is born out of the individual's attempts to solve inner conflicts and how it generates at the same time a new rift in the personality almost more dangerous than the original one.

In her third book, Self Analysis , the original four drives outlined by Horney in The Neurotic Personality of Our Times become expanded into 10 neurotic trends, which are then reconfigured again in Our Inner Conflicts into three character types or orientations: moving toward, against, or away from people to defend against basic anxiety. Basic anxiety is the result of the child's early and distorted relationships with his primary caretakers. Feeling helpless and alone in a potentially hostile world, the child is driven to protect himself against hostility and uncertainty. He finds safety by organizing his