12 aug The move in the direction of health.

Karen Horney describes in her book: Neurosis and human growth, the struggle toward self realisation.

It is a book worth reading. She starts with an introduction into the neurotic process. Under favourable conditions woman’s energies are put into the realisation of her own potentialities. According to her particular temperament, faculties, propensities and the conditions of her in her earlier and later life, she may become softer or harder, more cautious or more trusting, more or less self-reliant, more contemplative or more outgoing; and she may develop her special gifts. But wherever her course takes her, it will be her given potentialities which she develops.

Under inner stress, however, a person may become alienated from her real self. She will then shift the major part of her energies to the task of holding herself, by a rigid system of inner dictated, into a being of absolute perfection. For nothing short of godlike perfection can fulfil her idealised image of herself and satisfy her pride in the exalted attributes which (so she feels) she had, could have or should have.