Self-Analysis

Karen Horney, Horney, Karen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136342486
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First Published in 1999. Psychoanalysis first developed as a method of therapy in the strict medical sense. Freud had discovered that certain circumscribed disorders that have no discernible organic basis-such as hysterical convulsions, phobias, depressions, drug addictions, functional stomach upsets --can be cured by uncovering the unconscious factors that underlie them. In the course of time disturbances of this kind were summarily called neurotic. Therefore humility as well as hope is required in any discussion of the possibility of psychoanalytic self-examination. It is the object of this book to raise this question seriously, with all due consideration for the difficulties involved.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Systematic Self-Analysis of a Morbid Dependency

No amount of description, regardless of how carefully it is presented, can convey an adequate impression of exactly what is involved in the process of reaching an understanding of oneself. Therefore instead of discussing this process in detail I shall present an extensive example of self-analysis. It deals with a woman’s morbid dependency on a man, a problem which for many reasons is frequent in our civilization.

The situation described would be interesting enough if it were regarded merely as a common feminine problem. But its importance extends beyond the feminine sphere. An involuntary and in a deeper sense unwarranted dependency upon another person is a problem known to nearly everyone. Most of us deal with one or another aspect of it at one or another period of our lives, often recognizing its existence as little as Clare did when she started her analysis, and screening it instead behind such exquisite terms as “love” or “loyalty.” This dependency is so frequent because it seems to be a convenient and promising solution for many troubles we all have. It puts grave obstacles, however, in the way of our becoming mature, strong, independent people; and its promise of happiness is mostly fictitious. Therefore a delving into some of its unconscious implications may be interesting and helpful, even apart from the question of self-analysis, to anyone who regards self-reliance and good relationships with others as desirable goals.

The woman who tackled this problem by herself is Clare, who has kindly allowed me to publish the story of her progress. Her background and analytical develop ment have already been outlined, and thus I can dispense with many explanatory remarks that would otherwise be necessary.

But the main reason for selecting this report is neither the intrinsic interest of the problem it presents nor our knowledge of the person involved. Nor does this piece of analysis excel in brilliance or completeness. The reason is rather that with all its blunders and deficiencies the report shows clearly how a problem was gradually recognized and solved; even the blunders and deficiencies are sufficiently clear for discussion and sufficiently typical to make it possible to learn from them. It need hardly be emphasized that the process illustrated by this example is essentially the same in the analysis of any other neurotic trend.

The report could not well be published in its original form. On the one hand it has had to be elaborated, because it consists mostly of catchwords. On the other hand it has been abbreviated. For the sake of conciseness I have omitted those parts that are merely repetitious. Also, I have selected only that part of the report which is best rounded and which has a direct bearing on the problem of dependency, and have left out the earlier analytical endeavors to tackle the difficulties in the relationship, because they all ended in blind alleys. It would have been interesting to follow these futile attempts too, but it would not have added enough additional factors to justify the increased space required. Moreover, I have made only brief notes about the periods of resistance. In other words, the presentation on the whole deals only with the highlights of this particular analytical development.

Each aspect of the analysis, after a summary description, will be discussed. In these discussions several questions will be borne particularly in mind. What is the meaning of the findings? Which factors did Clare fail to see at the time? What are the reasons for her failure to see them?

After several months of not very productive efforts at self-analysis Clare awoke one Sunday morning with an intense irritation at an author who had failed to keep his promise to send an article for the magazine she edited. This was the second time he had left her in the lurch. It was intolerable that people should be so unreliable.

Soon after it struck her that her anger was out of proportion. The whole matter was scarcely of sufficient importance to wake her up at five in the morning. The mere recognition of a discrepancy between anger and alleged provocation made her see the real reason for the anger. The real reason also concerned unreliability, but in a matter more close to her heart. Her friend Peter, who had been out of town on business, had not returned for the week end as he had promised. To be exact, he had not given a definite promise, but he had said that he would probably be back by Saturday. He was never definite in anything, she told herself; he always aroused her hopes and then disappointed her. The fatigue she had felt the night before, which she had attributed to having worked too hard, must have been a reaction to her disappointment. She had canceled a dinner invitation because she had hoped for an evening with Peter, and then, when he did not show up, she had gone to a movie instead. She could never make any engagements because Peter hated to make definite dates in advance. The result was that she left as many evenings free as she possibly could, always harboring the disquieting thought, would he or wouldn’t he be with her?

While thinking of this situation two memories occurred to her simultaneously. One was an incident that her friend Eileen had told her years before. Eileen, during a passionate but rather unhappy relationship with a man, had fallen seriously ill with pneumonia. When she recovered from the fever she found to her surprise that her feelings for the man had died. He tried to continue the relationship, but he no longer meant anything to her. Clare’s other memory concerned a particular scene in a novel, a scene that had deeply impressed her when she was adolescent. The first husband of the novel’s heroine returned from war, expecting to find his wife overjoyed at his return. Actually the marriage had been torn by conflicts. During the husband’s absence the wife’s feelings had changed. She did not look forward to his coming. He had become a stranger to her. All she felt was indignation that he could be so presumptuous as to expect love just because he chose to want her—as if she and her feelings did not count at all. Clare could not help realizing that these two associations pointed to a wish to be able to break away from Peter, a wish that she referred to the momentary anger. But, she argued, I would never do it because I love him too much. With that thought she fell asleep again.

Clare made a correct interpretation of her anger when she saw it as caused by Peter rather than by the author, and her interpretation of the two associations was also right. But despite this correctness the interpretations, as it were, lacked depth. There was no feeling whatever for the force of the resentment she harbored against Peter. Consequently she regarded the whole outburst as only a transient grievance, and thus discarded much too lightly the wish to tear loose from him. Retrospectively it is clear that at that time she was far too dependent on Peter to dare to recognize either the resentment or the wish for separation. But she had not the slightest awareness of any dependency. She ascribed the apparent ease with which she overcame the anger to her “love” for her friend. This is a good example of the fact that one will get no more out of associations than one can stand at the time, even though, as in this instance, they speak an almost unmistakable language.

Clare’s basic resistance against the import of her associations explains why she did not raise certain questions that they suggested. It is significant, for example, that both of them, while connoting in a general way a wish to break off, indicated a very special form of breaking off: in both instances the woman’s feelings faded out while the man still wanted her. As we shall see later on, this was the only ending of a painful relationship that Clare could visualize. To break away from Peter on her own initiative was unthinkable because of her dependency upon him. The idea that he could break away from her would have aroused sheer panic, though there are good reasons to infer that she felt deep down that he did not really want her while she hung on to him. Her anxiety on this score was so deep that it took her considerable time to realize the mere fact that she was afraid. It was so great that even when she discovered her fear of desertion she still closed her eyes to the rather obvious fact that Peter wanted a separation. In thinking of incidents in which the woman herself was in a position to reject the man Clare revealed not only a wish to be free but also a desire for revenge, both deeply buried and both referring to a bondage which was itself unrecognized.

Another question that she did not raise was why the anger at Peter took a whole night to penetrate to awareness, and why, even then, it first concealed its true meaning by transferring itself to the author. The repression of her resentment is all the more striking as she was fully aware of her disappointment at Peter’s staying away. Moreover, on such an occasion resentment would certainly have been a natural reaction, and it was not in her character never to allow herself to be angry at anyone; she often was angry at people, though it was characteristic of her to shift anger from its real source to trivial matters. But to raise this question, while apparently only a routine matter, would have meant to broach the subject of why the relationship with Peter was so precarious that any disturbance of it had to be shut out of awareness.

After Clare had thus managed to shake off the whole problem from her conscious mind she fell asleep again and had a dream. She was in a foreign city; the people spoke a language that she did not understand; she lost her way, this feeling of being lost emerging very distinctly; she had left all her money in the luggage deposited at the station. Then she was at a fair; there was something unreal about it but she recognized gambling stands and a freak show; she was riding on a merry-go-round which turned around more and more quickly so that she became afraid, but she could not jump off. Then she was drifting on waves, and she woke up with a mixed feeling of abandon and anxiety.

The first part of the dream reminded her of an experience she had had in adolescence. She had been in a strange city; had forgotten the name of her hotel and had felt lost, as in the dream. Also it came back to her that the night before, when returning home from the movie, she had felt similarly lost.

The gambling stands and the freak show she associated with her earlier thought about Peter making promises and not keeping them. Such places, too, make fantastic promises and there, too, one is usually cheated. In addition, she regarded the freak show as an expression of her anger at Peter: he was a freak.

What really startled her in the dream was the depth of the feeling of being lost. She immediately explained away her impressions, however, by telling herself that these expressions of anger and of feeling lost were but exaggerated reactions to her disappointment, and that dreams express feelings in a grotesque way anyhow.

It is true that the dream translated Clare’s problems into grotesque terms, but it did not exaggerate the intensity of her feeling. And even if it had constituted a gross exaggeration it would not have been sufficient merely to dismiss it on that score. If there is an exaggeration it has to be examined. What is the tendency that prompts it? Is it in reality not an exaggeration but an adequate response to an emotional experience, the meaning and intensity of which are beyond awareness? Did the experience mean something quite different on the conscious and unconscious levels?

Judging from Clare’s subsequent development, the latter question was the pertinent one in this instance. Clare actually felt just as miserable, as lost, as resentful as the dream and the earlier associations indicated. But since she still clung to the idea of a close love relationship this realization was unacceptable to her. For the same reason she ignored that part of the dream about having left all her money in the luggage at the station. This was probably a condensed expression of a feeling that she had invested all she had in Peter, the station symbolizing Peter and also connoting something transitory and indifferent as opposed to the permanence and security of home. And Clare disregarded another striking emotional factor in the dream when she did not bother to account for its ending with anxiety. Nor did she make any attempts to understand the dream as a whole. She contented herself with superficial explanations of this and that element, and thus learned from it no more than she knew anyhow. If she had probed more deeply she might have seen the main theme of the dream as this: I feel helpless and lost; Peter is a great disappointment; my life is like a merry-go-round and I can’t jump off; there is no solution but drifting; but drifting is dangerous.

We cannot discard emotional experiences, however, as easily as we can discard thoughts unconnected with our feelings. And it is quite possible that Clare’s emotional experiences of anger and particularly of feeling lost, despite her blatant failure to understand them, lingered on in her mind and were instrumental in her pursuing the path of analysis she subsequently embarked upon.

The next piece of analysis still remains under the heading of resistance. While Clare was going over her associations the next day another memory occurred to her in connection with the “foreign city” of the dream. Once when she was in a foreign city she had lost her way to the station; since she did not know the language she could not ask directions and thus she missed her train. As she thought of this incident it occurred to her that she had behaved in a silly manner. She might have bought a dictionary, or she might have gone into any great hotel and asked the porter. But apparently she had been too timid and too helpless to ask. Then it suddenly struck her that this very timidity had played a part also in the disappointment with Peter. Instead of expressing her wish to have him back for the week end she had actually encouraged him to see a friend in the country so that he could have some rest.

An early memory emerged of her doll Emily, whom she loved most tenderly. Emily had only one flaw: she had only a cheap wig. Clare deeply wanted for her a wig of real hair, which could be combed and braided. She often stood before a toy shop and looked at dolls with real hair. One day she was with her mother in the toy shop, and the mother, who was generous in giving presents, asked her whether she would like to have a wig with real hair. But Clare declined. The wig was expensive and she knew that the mother was short of money. And she never got it, a memory which even now moved her almost to tears.

She was disappointed to realize that she had still not overcome her reluctance in expressing her wishes, despite the work on this problem during the course of her analytical treatment, but at the same time she felt tremendously relieved. This remaining timidity appeared to be the solution to her distress of the previous days. She merely had to be more frank with Peter and let him know her wishes.

Clare’s interpretation illustrates how an only partially accurate analysis can miss the essential point and blur the issue involved. It also demonstrates that a feeling of relief does not in itself prove that the solution found is the real one. Here the relief resulted from the fact that by hitting upon a pseudo solution Clare succeeded, temporarily, in circumventing the crucial problem. If she had not been unconsciously determined to find an easy way out of her disturbance she would probably have paid more attention to the association.

The memory was not just one more example of her lack of assertiveness. It clearly indicated a compulsion to give first importance to her mother’s needs in order to avoid becoming the object of even a vague resentment. The same tendency applied to the present situation. To be sure, she had been too timid in expressing her wish, but this inhibition arose less from timidity than from unconscious design. The friend, from all I gather, was an aloof person, hypersensitive to any demands upon him. At that time Clare was not fully aware of this fact, but she sensed it sufficiently to hold back any direct wishes concerning his time, just as she refrained from ever mentioning the possibility of marriage, though she often thought of it. If she had asked him to be back for the week end he would have complied, but with resentment. Clare could not have recognized this fact, however, without a dawning realization of the limitations within Peter, and this was still impossible for her. She preferred to see primarily her own share in the matter, and to see that part of it which she felt confident of overcoming. It should be remembered, too, that it was an old pattern of Clare’s to preserve a difficult relationship by taking all blame on herself. This was essentially the way in which she had dealt with her mother.

The result of Clare’s attributing the whole distress to her own timidity was that she lost—at least consciously—her resentment toward Peter, and looked forward to seeing him again. This happened the next evening. But a new disappointment was in store for her. Peter not only was late for the appointment but looked tired and did not express any spontaneous joy at seeing her. As a result she became self-conscious. He was quick to notice her freezing up and, as was apparently his habit, he took the offensive, asking her whether she had been angry at his not coming home for the week end. She answered with a weak denial but on further pressure admitted that she had resented it. She could not tell him of the pathetic effort she had made not to resent it. He scolded her for being childish and for considering only her own wishes. Clare was miserable.

In the morning paper a notice about a shipwreck brought back to her that part of her dream in which she had drifted on waves. When she had time to think about this dream fragment four associations occurred to her. One was a fantasy of a shipwreck in which she was drifting on the water. She was in danger of drowning when a strong man put his arms around her and saved her. With him she had a feeling of belonging, and of never-ending protection. He would always hold her in his arms and never, never leave her. The second association concerned a novel which ended on a similar tone. A girl who had gone through disastrous experiences with a number of men finally met the man she could love and upon whose devotion she could rely.

Then she remembered a fragment of a dream that she had had at the time she became familiar with Bruce, the older writer who had encouraged her and implicitly promised to be her mentor. In that dream she and Bruce walked together, hand in hand. He was like a hero or a demigod, and she was overwhelmed by happiness. To be singled out by this man was like an indescribable grace and blessing. When recalling this dream Clare smiled, for she had blindly overrated Bruce’s brilliance and only later had seen his narrow and rigid inhibitions.

This memory made her recall another fantasy, or rather a frequent daydream, which she had almost forgotten though it had played quite a role at college, before the time of her cru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. Feasibility and Desirability of Self-Analysis
• II. The Driving Forces in Neuroses
• III. Stages of Psychoanalytic Understanding
• IV. The Patient’s Share in the Psychoanalytic Process
• V. The Analyst’s Share in the Psychoanalytic Process
• VI. Occasional Self-Analysis
• VII. Systematic Self-Analysis: Preliminaries
• VIII. Systematic Self-Analysis of a Morbid Dependency
• IX. Spirit and Rules of Systematic Self-Analysis
• X. Dealing with Resistances
• XI. Limitations of Self-Analysis
• Index