The document summarizes key aspects of Karen Horney's neo-Freudian perspective. It outlines her early life experiences with depression and loss of family members. Horney disagreed with Freud's views on female psychology, rejecting the idea of penis envy. Instead, she proposed the concept of womb envy. The document also describes Horney's theory of neurosis, her identification of 10 neurotic needs, and her view that culture devalues women. Horney made important contributions to understanding social and cultural influences on personality.

1. NEO- FREUDIAN

2. GROUP
MEMBERS:
NILISHA KHANNA
NIKITA GOEL
PREET SHAH
SMRITI KARAN

3. INTRODUCTION:
Karen Danielsen Horney was born in Germany on September 16, 1885.
She was one of the few prominent female personality theorists from the first
half of the 20th Century.
She added social factors to the basic ideas of Freud's theory.
Horney's approach is called psychosocial analysis,
She emphasized on the emotional relations between parent and child early in
the child's life.
In 1906 she entered medical school.
She married Oscar Horney, a Berlin lawyer and economist, in 1909.
Her early letters to Oskar reflected her interest in the theories of Alfred Adler.
Karen was especially intrigued by Adler's ideas of inferiority and self-confidence

4. EARLY LI FE OF KAREN HORNEY
Karen Horney dealt with depression early in life. Her father was a strict and
disciplinarian and she was very close to her older brother, Berndt and when he
distanced himself from her, Horney became depressed.
The death of her mother and then brother in 1911 and 1923 were extremely
difficult for Horney.
She graduated from the University of Berlin in 1915. She joined the Berlin
Psychoanalytic Institute in 1918, and the following year she started her private
practice.
Freudians trained her but she never knew Freud personally.

5. CAREER
Horney's theory is perhaps the best theory of neurosis. she offered a different
way of viewing neurosis.
She saw it as much more continuous with normal life than previous theorists.
Specifically, she saw neurosis as an attempt to make life bearable, as a way of
"interpersonal control and coping.".
In her clinical experience, she discerned ten particular patterns of neurotic
needs.
While Horney followed much of Sigmund Freud's theory, she disagreed
with his views on female psychology. She rejected his concept of penis envy,
declaring it to be both inaccurate and demeaning to women. Horney instead
proposed the concept of womb envy in which men experience feelings of
inferiority because they cannot give birth to children.
Her further works includes self-theory, neurotic needs and feminine
psychology.

6. SELF- THEORY
Horney believed that the self is the core of one's being, their potential. If one has
an accurate conception of themselves, they are free to realize their potential.
The healthy person's real self is aimed at reaching their self-actualization
throughout life.The neurotic's self is split, however, into an ideal self and a
despised self.
One's ideal self is created when one feels they are lacking in some area of life and
are not living up to the ideals that they should be. What they "should" be is their
ideal. This ideal self is not a positive goal, nor is it realistic or possible.
The despised self, on the other hand, is the feeling that one is hated by all around
them; one assumes that this hated being is their true self. The neurotic,
therefore, swings back and forth between pretending to be perfect and hating
themselves.

8. HORNEY’S LIST OF NEUROTIC NEEDS
Psychoanalytic theorist Karen Horney developed one of the best known theories of
neurosis. She believed that neurosis resulted from basic anxiety caused by interpersonal
relationships. Her theory proposes that strategies used to cope with anxiety can be
overused, causing them to take on the appearance of needs.
These 10 neurotic needs can be classed into three broad categories:
Needs that move you towards others.
 Needs that move you away from others.
Needs that move you against others.
Well-adjusted individuals utilize all three of these strategies, shifting focus depending on
internal and external factors.
Neurotic people tend to utilize two or more of these ways of coping, creating conflict,
turmoil, and confusion.

9. In her book “self-analysis”(1942) , HORNEY outlined the 10 neurotic needs she
had identified:
1. The Neurotic Need for Affection and Approval
2. The Neurotic Need for a Partner Who Will Take Over One’s Life
3. The Neurotic Need to Restrict One’s Life Within Narrow Borders
4. The Neurotic Need for Power
5. The Neurotic Need to Exploit Others
6. The Neurotic Need for Prestige
7. The Neurotic Need for Personal Admiration
8. The Neurotic Need for Personal Achievement
9. The Neurotic Need for Self-Sufficiency and Independence
10.The Neurotic Need for Perfection and Unassailability

10. FEMININE PSYCHOLOGY
Karen Horney argued that psychoanalysis regarded women as defective men
because it is the product of a male genius (Freud) and a male-dominated culture.
 She believed that the womb envy of the male must be stronger than the so-
called penis envy of the female, since men need to depreciate women more than
women need to depreciate men.
Horney traced the male dread of woman to the boy’s fear that his genital is
inadequate in relation to the mother. The threat posed by woman is not castration
but humiliation; the threat is to his masculine self-regard.
 As he grows up, the male continues to have a deeply hidden anxiety about the
size of his penis or his potency, an anxiety that has no counterpart for the female.
The male deals with his anxiety by erecting an ideal of efficiency, by seeking sexual
conquests, and by debasing the love object.

11. Horney also wrote an essay entitled “The Overvaluation of Love” (1934). It is
reported to be the culmination of Horney’s attempt to analyze herself in terms of
feminine psychology.
“Our culture, as is well known, is a male culture, and therefore by and large not
favorable to the unfolding of woman and her individuality... No matter how
much the individual woman may be treasured as a mother or as a lover, it is
always the male who will be considered more valuable on human and spiritual
grounds. The little girl grows up under this general impression. (Horney, 1967,
p.82)

12. THANK YOU
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