Karen Danielsen Horney - Importance of childhood experience

Importance of Childhood Experience

[The Impact of Culture]

• Modern culture : Based on competition among individual

             - "Everyone is a real or potential competitor of everyone else"

• Competitiveness and the basic hostility it spawns result in feeling of isolation
• Feelings of being alone is a potentially hostile world lead to intensified needs for affection (Cause people to overvalue love)
• Love and affection is seen to be the solution for all their problems
• Genuine love can be a healthy, growth-producing experience but the desperate need for love provides a fertile ground for the development of neuroses

[The Importance of Childhood Experience]

• Childhood is the age from which the cast majority of problems arise
• Traumatic events may leave their impressions on a child's future development
• These event can be traced to lack of genuine warmth and affection
• Parents : Powerful effect on personal development
• Difficult childhood is responsible for neurotic needs

[Basic Hostility and Basic Anxiety]

• Each person begins life with the potential for healthy development
• People need favorable conditions for growth
• Children need to experience both genuine love and healthy discipline

[Role of parents]

• Parent's inability or unwillingness to love their child
• If parents do not satisfy the child's needs for safety and satisfaction, the children develops feelings of 'Basic Hostility' toward the parents
• Repressed hostility leads to profound feelings of insecurity and a large sense of apprehension called 'Basic Anxiety' - feeling of being isolation and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile
• Anxiety and fear can also lead to strong feelings of hostility

[4 General ways that people protect themselves against this feeling of being alone in a potentially hostile world :]

     1. Affection 

             - Strategy that does not always lead to authentic love. People may try to purchase love with

                self-effacing compliance, material goods, or sexual favors

     2. Submissiveness

             - Submit themselves either to people or to institutions such as an organization or a religion

               (Submits in order to gain affection)

     3. Power, Prestige, and Possession :

             - Power : A defense against the real or imaged hostility of others and takes the form

                             a tendency to dominate others

             - Prestige : A protection against humiliation and expressed as a tendency to humiliate others

             - Possession : Acts as a buffer against destitution and poverty and manifests itself

                                    as a tendency to deprive others

    

     4. Withdrawal

             - Developing an independence from others or by becoming emotionally detached from them

                > Can't be hurt by other people

• Horney believed that all people use them to some extent
• Compulsion is the salient characteristic of all neurotic drives

[Compulsive Drives]

• Neurotic individuals have the same problems that affect normal people, except neurotics experience them to a greater degree
• Aim is to guard themselves
• Neurotics do not enjoy misery and suffering
• Can't change their behavior by free will but must continually and compulsively protect themselves against basic anxiety