Karen Horney about the Consequences of Neurotic Development And the Ways of Its Overcoming

Abstract

This article investigates the views of Karen Horney on psychoanalysis and neurotic development of personality in her last two books: “Our Inner Conflicts” (1945) and “Neurosis and Human Grows” (1950), and also in her two articles “On Feeling Abused” (1951) and “The Paucity of Inner Experiences” (1952), written in the last two years of her life and summarizing her views on clinical and theoretical problems in her work with neurotics. If in her first book “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time” (1937) neurosis was a result of disturbed interpersonal relations, caused by conditions of culture, then the concept of the idealized Self open the gates to the intrapsychic life.