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Source: Basic anxiety

Basic anxiety is a term used by psychoanalytic theorist Karen Horney. She believed that neurosis resulted from basic anxiety caused by interpersonal relationships. Her theory proposes that strategies used to cope with anxiety can be overused, causing them to take on the appearance of needs. According to Horney, basic anxiety (and therefore neurosis) could result from a variety of things including, "…direct or indirect domination, indifference, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child's individual needs, lack of real guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration or the absence of it, lack of reliable warmth, having to take sides in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, over-protection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere, and so on and so on."
Karen Horney was born in September 1885 in Germany. Her father wanted her to stay home and not attend school; however, Horney wanted to pursue graduate school, even though no German universities admitted women at that time. She would eventually pursue research on basic anxiety. Basic anxiety is the feeling of being helpless, small, and insignificant, because of abuse and/or neglect. Horney's definition of basic anxiety explains that basic hostility may lead to basic anxiety, and vice versa.
Horney shared with Freud a belief that personality develops in the early childhood years, but she insisted that personality continues to change throughout life. Whereas Freud detailed psychosexual stages of development, Horney focused on how the growing child is treated by parents and caregivers. She denied universal developmental phases, such as an oral or anal stage. She suggested that if a child developed tendencies toward an oral or anal personality, these tendencies were a result of parental behaviors. Nothing in a child's development was universal; everything depended on social, cultural, and environmental factors.