“A need for love and affection”

“A need for love and affection”

When I saw this photo on the internet, I was touched by the depth of emotions of this child. I can feel her sadness and longing for love and affection from her parents. It seems that she had a terrifying childhood experience which led her to feel that way. I chose this photo to represent the theory of personality development that I like most, the Psychoanalytic Social Theory by Karen Horney. It is built on the assumption that social and cultural conditions, especially childhood experiences, are largely responsible for shaping personality. All children need feelings of safety and security, but these can be gained only by love from parents. Unfortunately, parents often neglect, dominate, reject, or overindulge their children, conditions that lead to the child’s feelings of basic hostility toward parents. If children repress basic hostility, they will develop feelings of insecurity and a pervasive sense of apprehension called basic anxiety.

In the photo, I can see the fear of helplessness and abandonment which refers to as "basic anxiety". She needs affection and approval on the part of their peers. It seems that the child needing to be loved wants to move towards her parents but fears rejection. The child also feels hostility and wants to get revenge by moving against the parents but fears punishment. As a result, the child may give up and move away from the parents just like the girl in the photo. She is a child whose self is split between an idealized self and a real self. She is like a clock's pendulum, swinging between a erroneous "perfection" and a manifestation of self-hate. Horney referred to this phenomenon as the "tyranny of the shoulds" and the neurotic's hopeless "search for glory". Among the theories of personality development, I chose Psychoanalytic Social Theory because Horney looked at neurosis in a different light, saying that it was much more continuous with normal life than other theorists believed.