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Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris
Читать онлайн.Название Imagined Human Beings
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isbn 9780814768853
Автор произведения Bernard Jay Paris
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Издательство Ingram
In compliant people, says Horney, there are “a variety of aggressive tendencies strongly repressed” (1945, 55). They are repressed because experiencing them or acting them out would clash violently with their need to be good and would radically endanger their whole strategy for gaining love, protection, and approval. It would undermine their bargain with fate. Compliant people’s strategies increase their buried hostility since they invite abuse but also make them afraid of expressing anger or fighting back.
Because of their need for surrender and a safe outlet for their aggression, compliant people are often attracted to their opposite, masterful expansive people whose “egotism, ambition, callousness, unscrupulousness” and “wielding of power” they may consciously condemn but secretly admire (Horney 1945, 54). Merging with such people allows them “to participate vicariously in the mastery of life without having to own it” to themselves (Horney 1950, 244). This kind of relationship usually develops into a morbid dependency that exacerbates compliant people’s difficulties. When the love relationship fails them, they will be terribly disillusioned and may feel that they did not find the right person, that something is wrong with them, or that nothing is worth having.
There are numerous predominantly compliant or self-effacing characters in literature who have been analyzed in Horneyan terms. Starting with Shakespeare, these include Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Viola in Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Desdemona, Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, Prospero (Paris 1991a), the poet in Shakespeare’s sonnets (Lewis 1985; Paris 1991a), and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra (Paris 1991b). In later writers, there is Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Paris 1978b), Thackeray’s Dobbin and Amelia (Paris 1974), Esther Summerson in Dickens’s Bleak House (Eldredge 1986), Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (Paris 1974), Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Paris 1976a), Conrad’s Charley Marlow (Paris 1974, 1993b), the priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (Straub 1986), Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog (Paris 1976b), Alice Mellings in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (Eldredge 1989), and George Bailey in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (Gordon 1994). As is true for characters exemplifying each of the major solutions, most have inner conflicts and manifest other trends. There are many more characters displaying each solution than I shall cite here, since I am mentioning only prime examples who have already been discussed in print.
People in whom expansive tendencies predominate have goals, traits, and values that are the opposite of those of self-effacing people. What appeals to them most is not love, but mastery. They abhor helplessness, are ashamed of suffering, and need to achieve success, prestige, or recognition. There are three expansive types: the narcissistic, the perfectionistic, and the aggressive or arrogant-vindictive.
The arrogant-vindictive solution is in many ways the opposite of the self-effacing one. Arrogant-vindictive people usually have had a particularly harsh childhood in which they have encountered “sheer brutality, humiliations, derision, neglect, and flagrant hypocrisy.” Like the survivors of concentration camps, they go through “a hardening process in order to survive.” As children, they “may make some pathetic and unsuccessful attempts to win sympathy, interest, or affection but finally choke off all tender needs.” Since affection is unattainable, they scorn it or conclude that it does not exist. Thus they have no incentive to please and can give free rein to their bitter resentment. The desire for love is replaced by ambition and a drive toward “vindictive triumph.” They live for the “day of reckoning” when they will prove their superiority, put their enemies to shame, and show how they have been wronged. They dream of becoming the great hero, “the persecutor, the leader, the scientist attaining immortal fame” (Horney 1950, 202–3).
As adults, arrogant-vindictive people are ferociously competitive: they “cannot tolerate anybody who knows or achieves more . . . , wields more power, or in any way questions [their] superiority” (Horney 1950, 198). They have to drag their rivals down or defeat them. They retaliate when injured by hurting their enemies more than they have hurt them. They are ruthless and cynical in their relations with others, seeking to exploit and outsmart everyone. They trust no one and are out to get others before others get them. They avoid emotional involvement and dependency and use the relations of friendship and marriage to enhance their position. They want to be hard and tough and regard all manifestations of feeling as sloppy sentimentality.
Whereas self-effacing people tend to be masochistic, arrogant-vindictive people are often sadistic. They want to enslave others, to play on their emotions, to frustrate, disparage, and humiliate them. Horney does not explain this behavior in sexual terms but sees it partly as their way of retaliating for injuries and partly as a response to their sense of the emptiness and futility of their lives. They develop a pervasive envy of everyone who seems to possess something they lack, whether it be wealth and prestige, physical attractiveness, or love and devotion. The happiness of others “irritates” them. If they “cannot be happy,” “why should [others] be so?” The arrogant-vindictive person must “trample on the joy of others” because if they “are as defeated and degraded as he, his own misery is tempered in that he no longer feels himself the only one afflicted” (Horney 1945, 201–2).
Aggressive people regard the world as “an arena where, in the Darwinian sense, only the fittest survive and the strong annihilate the weak.” A “callous pursuit of self-interest is the paramount law” (Horney 1945, 64). There are no values inherent in the order of things except that might makes right. Considerateness, compassion, loyalty, unselfishness are all scorned as signs of weakness, “as restraints on the path to a sinister glory” (Horney 1950, 203). Those who value such qualities are fools just asking to be exploited. Aggressive people are sometimes drawn toward compliant types, however, because of their submissiveness and malleability—and also because of their own repressed self-effacing tendencies.
Just as self-effacing people must repress their aggressive impulses in order to make their solution work, so for arrogant-vindictive people any “attitude of compliance would be incompatible” with their “whole structure of living” and would “shake its foundations.” They need to fight their softer feelings: “Nietzsche gives us a good illustration of these dynamics when he has his superman see any form of sympathy as a sort of fifth column, an enemy operating from within” (Horney 1945, 69–70). They fear the emergence of compliant trends because this would make them vulnerable in an evil world, would cause them to feel like fools, and would threaten their bargain, which is essentially with themselves. They do not count on the world to give them anything but are convinced they can reach their ambitious goals if they remain true to their vision of life as a battle and do not allow themselves to be seduced by the traditional morality or their own compliant tendencies. If their predominant solution collapses, powerful self-effacing trends may emerge.
Predominantly arrogant-vindictive characters who have been discussed in Horneyan terms include Iago (Rosenberg 1961, Rabkin and Brown 1973, Paris 1991a), Edmund, Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth after the murder (Paris 1991a), and Richard III and Cassius (Paris 1991b) in Shakespeare; Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (Paris 1974); Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (Paris 1974); Count Guido in Browning’s The Ring and the Book (Lewis 1986); Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Paris 1978c, 1991c, 1994b); and Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August (Haselswerdt 1986).
Predominantly narcissistic people also seek mastery, but their childhoods are quite different from those of arrogant-vindictive people, as are their strategies of defense. Whereas arrogant-vindictive people have usually been subject to abuse, narcissistic people were often “favored and admired” children who were “gifted beyond average” and “early and easily won distinctions” (Horney 1950, 194). The goal of aggressive people is to prove their superiority to their detractors through achievement; the goal of narcissistic people is to maintain the sense of being exceptional that they imbibed in childhood. “Healthy friction with the wishes and will of others” (18), which Horney regards as an essential condition