Neurosis and Human Growth

Neurosis and Human Growth was the culmination of Horney's mature work. After The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and New Ways in Psychoanalysis, Horney jettisoned Freud's metapsychology altogether and gave rein to her own vision of psychoanalysis. Beginning with Our Inner Conflicts and reaching full expression in her major work, Neurosis and Human Growth, Horney reinterpreted psychoanalysis at every level of understanding, from the most exquisite psychological

descriptions of character structure to the most profound metapsychological underpinnings of self-theory.

I will try to show how Horney reconfigured both the psychology and the metapsychology of psychoanalysis and thereby anticipated virtually all of the contemporary schools of thought in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including couples therapy and family therapy. I will try to show how Horney's character solutions and her subjective frame of reference anticipated relational models, two-person psychology, cognitive models, intersubjectivity, social constructionism and deconstructionism, systemic therapies and, most assuredly, Heinz Kohut's recent self-psychological theory.

Having purged herself of Oedipal language and mental apparatus in psychology in general, Horney arrived at her new psychoanalytic psychology of self, an unreified concept of selfhood that transcended existing paradigms and defined a new approach to psychoanalysis, essentially a new epistemology. To wit: an ego can be abstracted as a mental construct, but only a self can experience pain, self-hate, or growth. As one more fully grasps the reality of the self, the interplay of health and illness can be more fully engaged. The analyst becomes more able during this process to “feel” the inborn capacity for growth in all patients, in all people, and in himself. As these constructive movements deepen, selfness itself becomes a centering experience and selfhood a centering concept.

I have used the word centering to describe Horney's concept of self. T