Relation of Anxiety and Pride
In The Nature and Destiny of Man , Reinhold Niebuhr exposes the relationship between anxiety, the "precondition" of sin, and pride, the "quintessential" sin.
"An interesting admission by Freud of an error he had made in his calculations points much further than Freud realizes. In reporting on his analysis of the Oedipus complex he declares: "Let it suffice to say that, to our astonishment, the result was the reverse of what we had expected. It is not repression that creates anxiety; it is there first and creates repression" ([Freud], p. 120). If Freud could have realized how basic a concomitant of human freedom anxiety is, and how little it has to do with "external danger" it would have become apparent that all the aberrations with which he deals are not the consequence of the repressions of his "super-ego" but arise out of the very character of human freedom. A modern and very intelligent Freudian, Karen Horney, seeks to prove that both the "will-to-power" which Alfred Adler regards as the basic impulse and the libidinal impulse in Freud must be regarded as derivatives from a more basic anxiety. "Neither Freud nor Adler has recognized the role which anxiety plays in bringing about such drives" (The Neurotic Personality of Our Time," p. 187). Miss Horney regards Freud's theory as too narrowly biological: "He tends to attribute sociological phenomena to psychic factors and these primarily to biological factors" (p. 28). But Miss Horney in turn has a purely sociological explanation for anxiety: "Modern culture is economically based upon the principle of competition. . . . The potential hostile tension between individuals results in constant generation of fears" (p. 284). In substituting this socio-economic interpretation of the root of anxiety for a purely biological one, Miss Horney comes only slightly nearer to the truth. Modern psychoanalysts might learn much about the basic character of anxiety and its relation to human freedom from the greatest of Christian psychologists, Soren Kierkegaard, who devoted a profound study to this problem: Der Begriff der Angst" (pp. 43-44, n. 4).
And later:
"The school of modern psychology which regards the will-to-power as the most dominant of human motives has not yet recognized how basically it is related to insecurity, Adler attributes it to specific forms of the sense of inferiority and therefore believes that a correct therapy can eliminate it. Karen Horney relates the will-to-power ["search for glory"] to a broader anxiety than the specific cases of the sense of inferiority which Adler enumerates. But she thinks that the will-to-power springs from the general insecurities of a competitive civilization and therefore holds out hope for its elimination in a co-operative society. This is still far short of the real truth. The truth is that man is tempted by the basic insecurity of human existence to make himself doubly secure and by the insignificance of his place in the total scheme of life to prove his significance. The will-to-power is in short a direct form and an indirect instrument of the pride which Christianity regards as sin in its quintessential form" (pg. 192).
Tags: will to power, reinhold niebuhr, anxiety, pride
Google Search: niebuhr will.to.power
Sigmund Freud (1965). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton.
Karen Horney (1937). The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton.
Soren Kierkegaard (1957). The Concept of Dread. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Reinhold Niebuhr (1996, c. 1941, 1964). The Nature and Destiny of Man: a Christian Interpretation, 2 vols. Louisville: Westminster Charles Knox.
| 