In addition, I am suggesting that the three expansive types are probably over-represented among Americans who speak out most loudly against government regulations (a.k.a. Republicans).
Horney has described the three expansive types in the following paragraphs:
"He [the expansive type any one of the three expansive types] glorifies and cultivates in himself everything that means mastery. Mastery with regard to others entails the need to excel and to be superior in some way. He tends to manipulate or dominate others and to make them dependent upon him. This trend is also reflected in what he expects their attitude toward him to be. Whether he is out for adoration, respect, or recognition, he is concerned with their subordinating themselves to him and looking up to him. He abhors the idea of his being compliant, appeasing, or dependent.
"Furthermore, he is proud of his ability to cope with any contingency and is convinced that he can do so. There is, or should be, nothing that he cannot accomplish. Somehow he must be and feels that he is the master of his fate. Helplessness may make him feel panicky and he hates any trace of it in himself.
"Mastery with regard to himself means that he is his idealized proud self. Through
will power and reason he is the captain of his soul. Only with great reluctance
does he recognize any forces in himself which are unconscious, i.e., not
subject to his conscious control. It disturbs him inordinately to recognize a
conflict within himself, or any problem that he cannot solve (master) right
away. Suffering is felt as a disgrace to be concealed. It is typical for him
that in analysis he has no particular difficulty in recognizing his pride, but
he is loath to see his shoulds, or at any rate that aspect of them which
implies that he is shoved around by them. Nothing should push him around. As
long as possible he maintains the fiction that he can lay down laws to himself and
fulfill them. He abhors being helpless toward anything in himself as much as or
more than being helpless toward any external factor" (pp. 214-15).
I myself am acquainted with the type of neurotic sense of mastery that Horney discusses here. For a variety of reasons, my sense of mastery was actually advanced during my childhood and my teenage years as I was socially conditioned to play a helper role. I was my mother's helper and my father's helper, and I also played the role of helper in school. My efforts at being a helper were recognized and acknowledged by my mother and my father and other adult authority figures. In this way, my prizing of mastery was enhanced and socially reinforced.
However, in accord with Horney's observations about mastery and helplessness, my neurotic sense of mastery still makes it difficult for me to tolerate feeling helpless. By definition, feeling helpless is not a pleasant feeling. But who among can go through life without feeling helpless at times?
But the real threat of feelings of helplessness is that they will somehow resonate with our unconscious repressed abandonment feelings, which involve acute feelings of helplessness. When our feelings of helplessness in the present catch our unconscious repressed feelings of helplessness from the past, then the sheer power of our unconscious repressed feelings of helplessness can be overpowering. Such repressed feelings are so overpowering that they must be expressed somehow, because it can seem impossible to contain them within oneself. But the expression of such powerful feelings must be channeled in non-violent ways, because it can lead to violence otherwise.
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