The vicissitudes of affect in Horney's theory

Abstract

Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian analyst who immigrated from Germany to the USA, undertook the difficult task of developing a theory that remained concrete psychology without resorting to biology or to metapsychological entelechies. Although her basic construct, as in Freud, is a conflict between nature and culture, nature for her is the naturally endowed real self, which the neurotic abandons bowing to cultural pressures. This process of desertion is teleological and based on imagination, and is also creative. It entails the pursuit of a god-like idealized image of the self shaped according to narrow and despoiled values. Being interpersonal, Horney's theory avoids third-person objectification which creates a false distance; it thus remains (inter)subjective. A theory of interpersonal affect, it is dramatic before being dynamic. It also abandons claims to universality as it does to the “objectivity” of the natural sciences. Horney's focus on alienation brings her close to Hegel and Marx, a neglected fact, and she pioneered feminist and self-help theories. The difficulty in reading Horney is not her abstruseness, since her theory refuses technicism. It resides rather in that resistance created by what Althusser called interpellation: one feels her finger pointed at oneself as one reads.