The Real Self and Psychic Interiority: A Response to Drs. Paris, Horner, and Spero

I find it a pleasure to respond to three such distinguished colleagues, all of whom I have had the good fortune to engage in matters clinical and theoretical over many years.

Bernard J. Paris, the literary critic and eminent biographer of Karen Horney, states that on initially reading Neurosis and Human Growth he found Horney's ideas clear in every regard with one exception: the real self. Only later, after undergoing much therapy, did it become evident to him what Horney intended. As he tells us, Horney's concept of the real self refers to the central source from which personal growth proceeds. Constructive aspects of living, including morality, genuine responsibility, and creativity, all emanate from the real self. Horney's real self, he continues, has much in common with Masterson's concept of the same name, with Kohut's nuclear self, Winnicott's true self, and Homer's intrinsic self. These authors concur that whatever adversely impacts the actualization of this healthy essential self, however denoted, produces psychopathology. Paris expands briefly on Horney's view of how untoward development impacts the actualization of the real self. Finding Horney's theory of motivation lacking, Paris turns to the taxonomy of motivation elaborated by Maslow, finding it nicely supplementing Horney's work.

Now, having very adequately presented the argument on behalf of Horney's real self and similar concepts by related authors, he takes me to task for rejecting the concept of the real self. I reject it, he claims, because I have wrongly interpreted it: I have idealized it. I acknowledge that he is right, partially, but not for the reason he suggests.

Certainly, anything idealized becomes oppressive. Whatever is idealized enters a personal lexicon of archetypal psychical structures. These structures are characterized by perfection, immutability, and imperativeness. Although these idealized structures are unconscious, they map to coordinates in consciousness and manifest in thought,