S Life And The Need example essay topic

569 words
Karen Horney was an American psychiatrist born in Hamburg, Germany to Clotilde and Berndt Danielson on September 16, 1885. Her early adulthood brought her several years of stress and depression. In 1904, her mother divorced her father and Karen did not cope well with that. She would then later go on to get married her self in 1909 to a man by the name of Oscar Horney. They would go on to have three children. It was the years to come that Karen would have the most trouble with.

After Karen,'s mom died in 1911, he marriage then failed and forced her to move to Brooklyn, New York. That,'s when she found out that her brother died in 1930. The strain of these events were very hard on her, so she decided to enter psychoanalysis, but this caused a deep depression within her that also, made her want to commit suicide. While in Brooklyn after all Karen,'s hardships, she became secretary of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

From there, she went to Chicago to attend the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis where she became the Assistant Director. When her time was up at the Institute, Karen went right back to New York to lecture at the new school for social research. In 1941, she founded her own school called The American Institute of Psychoanalysis. She became the first woman whom found an independent psychoanalytic society. She contributed to many neofroidian theories, such as her theory of neurosis and famine psychology. Karen made big accomplishments in her psychoanalytic field of study.

Karen saw neurosis as much more continuous with normal life than previous theorists and also as an attempt to make life bearable, as a way of "interpersonal control and coping". This means, what we all strive to do on a day-to-day basis, only most of us seem to be doing all right, while the neurotic seems to sinking fast. She then made then patterns of neurotic needs based on her clinical experience. As Horney investigated these neurotic needs, she began to recognize that they could be clustered into three broad coping strategies. The fist is compliance, which includes, the need for affection and approval, the need for partner, for someone who will take one,'s life, and the need to restrict one,'s life to narrow boarders.

The second is aggression, which includes, the need for power, the need to exploit others and to get he better of them, the need for social recognition or prestige, the need for personal admiration and the need for personal achievement. The last category is called withdrawal, which includes, the need for self-sufficiency and independence, the need for perfection and unassailability and as well as the need to restrict one,'s life to narrow borders. Karen had one more way of looking at neurosis in terms of self-images. She explains that the self is the core of your being, your potential. This means, if you were healthy, you would have an accurate idea of who you are.

You would then, be free to realize that potential which is called, self-realization. Horney,'s theories of neurotics are good, but "they" are said to limit the neurotic. Besides leaving out psychotics and other problems, she leaves out how truly healthy a person is.