There are few books that I read (fortunately) that hit me with what I can only describe as "explosive force."
In fact, Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth is one of the first books I can remember that I could not finish until I had set it aside for a while (nearly two months) to digest what I had read. For a time, it turned my life inside out and left me staring at the broken remnants of what I might previously dignify with the label "self-understanding." That is, it called into question my understanding of humans and their relationships with such power that I wondered whether I ever had a sensible thought on the subject prior.
As a "Neo-Freudian," Horney eventually rejected several core tenets of Freud's teachings. At the end of Neurosis and Human Growth, she describes the central difference between them as a difference between optimism and pessimism. While for Freud, the deepest impulses of human life are destructive and libidinal, for Horney the deepest impulses are creative and oriented toward self-fulfillment.
I'll address the relationship between Horney's work and Christianity below. Needless to say, it is complex. But Neurosis and Human Growth is provocative because it is so hard to distinguish where it goes awry. Horney's theory has extraordinary explanatory power.
The work begins with a fundamental distinction between a person's real self--that is, a "central inner force" that allows him to feel and express his spontaneous feelings and drives him to cultivate his "particular human potentialities"--and the corruption that occurs to this real self when a young person feels "isolated and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile." That is, when parents reject, inappropriately fawn over, or otherwise mistreat a young person, the basis for their life shifts away from their real self to what Horney calls a basic anxiety. The basic anxiety that now drives the person's sense of self distorts the young person's sense of proper relationships: "Affection, for instance, becomes clinging; compliance becomes appeasement."
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