Neurosis and Human Growth

The Struggle toward Self-Realization

By: Karen Horney MD

Narrated by: Heather Henderson

One of the most original psychoanalysts after Freud, Karen Horney 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.

Karen Horney was born in Hamburg in 1885 and studied at the University of Berlin, receiving her medical degree in 1913. From 1914 to 1918 she studied psychiatry at Berlin-Lankwitz, Germany, and from 1918 to 1932 taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. She participated in many international congresses, among them the historic discussion of lay analysis chaired by Sigmund Freud.

Dr. Horney came to the United States in 1932 and for two years was associate director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 1934 she came to New York and was a member of the teaching staff of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute until 1941, when she became one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.

In Neurosis and Human Growth, Dr. Horney discusses the neurotic process as a special form of human development: the antithesis of healthy growth. She unfolds the different stages of this situation, describing neurotic claims, the tyranny of inner dictates, and the neurotic’s solutions for relieving the tensions of conflict in such emotional attitudes as domination, self-effacement, dependency, or resignation. Throughout, she outlines with penetrating insight the forces that work for and against the person’s realization of his or her potentialities.

©1950 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“ Neurosis and Human Growth is in my opinion the most important psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of the human organism…since the basic work of Sigmund Freud.” (Isidore Portnoy, MD)

Karen at her best

Painfully insightful. I appreciated the perspective of the author. the Reader more than excellent. Thank you

Very insightful; a must read to understanding self

This book opened my mind to new ways of facing personal deficits and shortcomings. It offers clear thinking on the self, and seems to me, a most important text.

Best psychology book

This book blows all the current pop psychology books away. The problem I have with this audio version is that the reader reads too fast. The 0.75x iOS option is too slow. I had to use a third party app (bookmobile) to play it back at 0.85x.

Makes a lot of sense.

I liked this book a lot and recognized myself very clearly in one of the types she describes. I wish there was a workbook based on this theory that would contain exercises for people with different solution types. Her theory makes a lot more sense to me than just incessant talking about depression and anxiety...

Common sense advice for life

Don't let the title of this book fool you. This is not a psycho-babble guide to finding the real you. The author is a very intelligent woman who trained as a psycho-analyst and worked for years helping people with problems they found overwhelming. Her experience provides the listener with a common sense approach to deal with the types of problems we all encounter simply because life is not perfect. She helped me understand that my demands on myself for personal perfection lead to self-hate. She provided a guide for accepting my real self beginning with honesty and compassion. I have always avoided authors who write self-help manuals with the secret for happiness. This author doesn't claim she can cure all of your problems. What she can do is help me and others to better deal with problems that have made them feel unhappy and out of place all of their lives. The narrator of the book conveys the calm helpful message of the author very well. This is a very good book that I highly recommend.

the reactionary psyche

I liked the concept of *pride system*, the emphasis on interpersonal reaction as vulnerable mind is waylaid by many and varied tricky tangents of self-ishness, the neurotic reaction or retreat.

Best book ever.

Buy this shit. You'll stop shoulding on yourself. Its worth the credit you get or just spend the dough.

A Work of Genius - Narrated With Feeling

Horney deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for this book. Just an unqualified opinion from a random reader? Perhaps... although it was written decades ago, it must be more relevant now than ever. In a society that tries to crush the individual at every turn, anyone who wants to grow into themselves--their real selves, and not their culturally defined ego--will find in this book a truly powerful weapon against the forces of inner tyranny.

Sometimes we find ourselves molding our behavior with inner dictates to such an extent that we stifle our true motives and actions from taking shape in our lives. Sometimes we try so hard to the ideal of what we "should" be, that we forget to be what we are. It's painful to feel distant from yourself, but it's even more painful to feel like you can never measure up to your "ideal" self.

When you realize down the road that a lot of the mistakes you've made were toward protecting your "ideal" self and not your real self, you might explain a lot of the feelings of futility in your life, of always making the same mistakes, of never keeping a "leg up," of dead-end relationships and countless circular patterns of destructive behavior. This book is about growing into your real self. So throw aside your notions of who you think you should be, and be ready to embrace who you are.

It's hard work, but thanks to the sympathetic and emphatic reading from Heather Henderson, you can also take it seriously, even if you're not a psychoanalyst. The audio of this book truly adds an element of solemn weightiness that you probably wouldn't find in the print version. I believe the narrator understands the book on a deep level. Perhaps she used it to solve some of her own neurotic trends.

This will be on my list of top 10 books everyone should read, probably #3.

Great book

Great book about pscicology and human growth. It offers a clear view and detailed description of selected profiles behaviors.

An incredible book.

I've been reading a lot of classic psychology of late - Freud, Jung, Fromm, May, Becker, Tillich - and for me this is the best of the lot in terms of applicability to my life.