The Neurotic Personality of Our Time

About this book

One of the most original psychoanalysts after Freud, Karen Horeny pioneered such now-familiar concepts as alienation, self-realization, and the idealized image, and she brought to psychoanalysis a new understanding of the importance of culture and environment. In this book, Karen Horney explores the basic structure of neuroses in the context of their cultural assumptions. Her topics range from the neurotic need for affection, to guilt feelings and the quest for power, prestige and possession. Horney maintains that the conflicts found in neurotic persons in a given culture correspond to to the ways of life characteristic of that culture. She writes for example, " It is only under definite cultural conditions that we find domineering or self- sacrificing mothers, and it is also only because of these existing conditions that such an experience will have an influence on later life."