Chapter 6 Horney: Psychoanalytic Social Theory 191disorders. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) contains “clusters” of
personality disorders. Cluster A personality disorders are known as the odd or
eccentric disorders and include paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal. Cluster B are
the dramatic, emotional, or erratic group, and include antisocial, borderline, his-
trionic, and narcissistic. Cluster C, the anxious and fearful group of disorders,
includes avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive. Their study showed that
the Cluster A disorders were negatively correlated with the features of Horney’s
Compliant Type, confirming that people with these disorders do not exhibit sym-
pathetic or altruistic behaviors, and have a low need for relationships. In contrast,
the Cluster C group correlated positively with Compliance. For the Cluster B
group, Aggression was the strongest predictor, suggesting that people with these
disorders behave erratically, and often show hurtful intent toward others and
themselves.
In research on the predictive validity of the HCTI, Rosowsky and colleagues
(2012) explored the question of whether Horney’s trends predicted marital satisfac-
tion in long-term married couples, that is, those who were married for 40 years or
more. The study administered the Comprehensive Marital Satisfaction Scale
(CMSS, Blum & Mehrabian, 1999) and the Horney-Coolidge Tridimensional
Inventory (HCTI) to 32 couples who were married 40 years or more (mean age
for men was 74 and for women it was 73). The main finding was that husbands
and wives who had low scores on the Detachment scale (moving away) were hap-
pier in their marriages than those who score high on detachment. In short, detach-
ment is associated with an unhappy marriage. Interestingly, moving toward
(compliance) and moving against (aggression) were unrelated to marital satisfac-
tion in both wives and husbands.
In another study, Coolidge et al. (2011) established the psychometric proper-
ties of a child and adolescent version of the HCTI. These authors wanted to test the
validity of Horney’s contention that cultural, familial, and childhood experience
shape the three trends. They reasoned that if this were the case, the trends should
manifest themselves relatively early in life. Parents of over 300 children, ages 5–17,
completed the revised instrument, and indeed sufficient internal and test-retest reli-
ability as well as construct validity emerged.
In sum, Coolidge and colleagues’ work with their HCTI strongly suggests
that Horney’s theory provides a parsimonious way of understanding three
important facets of normal and disordered personality, and for adults as well as
children. Further research on the predictive value of these new scales in clinical
and nonclinical settings is surely warranted, but for now it seems clear that
Horney’s perspective holds up in psychometric research operationalizing her
three neurotic trends.
Can Neuroticism Ever Be a Good Thing?
Horney’s theory, as well as most of the work in personality psychology, paints
neuroticism rather negatively. Based on the research reviewed in the previous sec-
tion on neuroticism and avoidance goals and the associated negative outcomes, the
negative bias toward neuroticism is understandable. Some recent research has