Typological models of Karen Horney and Carl Jung
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As part of the project "Personality Typology in the Work of a Psychologist," we are launching a series of articles "Typological models of Karen Horney and Carl Jung." In these articles, we will compare Karen Horney's psychoanalytic types with Carl Jung's types.
One of the objectives of the project "Personality Typology in the Work of a Psychologist" is to show the connection between Jung's types and psychoanalytic types and personality disorders.
We decided to start the review of psychoanalytic types with the descriptions of Karen Horney, since in her works the types are described in an easy to understand language.
In her last book, “Neurosis and Personal Growth” (1950), Karen Horney describes various neurotic character types (or structures), which she divides into three groups: Expansive, Self-effacing, and Resigned. She includes the Narcissistic, Perfectionist, and Arrogant-Vindictive types among the Expansive types.
• NARCISSISTIC type
• PERFECTIONISTIC type (Obsessive-Compulsive)
• ARROGANT-VINDICTIVE type (Sadistic)
• SELF-EFFACING type (Masochistic)
• RESIGNED type (Passive-Aggressive)
Within the Self-effacing group, as well as within the Resigned group, two autonomous types can be distinguished. Thus, Karen Horney describes approximately 7 autonomous personality types.
Horney believed that several neurotic types could be combined in a person.
Carl Jung, in his book “Psychological Types” (1921), describes the dynamics of neurotic processes for 8 character types. The 8 types are combined in a certain way, and their combination gives 16 subtypes.
Both Karen Horney and Carl Jung believed that effective therapy requires an understanding of the client's personality structure, or psychological type.
Horney wrote “In the framework of my psychological theories the NEUROTIC CHARACTER STRUCTURE is central. And so my criteria for "types" cannot be this or that symptomatic picture, or this or that individual trend. It can be only the peculiarities of a whole neurotic structure.” (1)
She emphasized: “For the analyst a knowledge of the basic characteristics is of great help in sizing up the whole picture quickly. When one or another of them strikes our attention we must look for the others; and we are reasonably sure to find them… They are not a series of unrelated peculiarities but a closely interknit structure. It is, at least in its basic composition, a picture of great consistency and unity, looking as if it had been painted in one hue.” (2)
“We could almost predict in a neurotic individual the kind of difficulties he is likely to have in his work — provided we are familiar with his character structure.” (3)
Jung believed that knowledge of typology could help a practicing psychologist "avoid many serious blunders in dealing with his patients." (4)
Jung notes: “For I have frequently observed the way in which a physician, in the case for instance of an exclusively intellectual subject, will do his utmost to develop the feeling function directly out of the unconscious. This attempt must always come to grief, since it involves too great a violation of the conscious standpoint. Should such a violation succeed, there ensues a really compulsive dependence of the patient upon the physician, a 'transference' … But the approach to the unconscious and to the most repressed function is disclosed, as it were, of itself, and with more adequate protection of the conscious standpoint, when the way of development is via the secondary function.” (5)
In the following posts, we will analyze each of Horney’s types and show their correlation with Jung’s types.
Last updating 15.09.2026
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1 - Neurosis and Human Growth. Chapter 8. The expansive solutions: the appeal of mastery
2 - Neurosis and Human Growth. Chapter 11. Resignation: the appeal of freedom
3 - Neurotic Disturbances in Work. Lecture, 1950
4 - Carl Jung “Psychological Typology”. Feb. 1936
5 - Carl Jung “Psychological Types”, 1921. Chapter X. 11. The Principal and Auxiliary Functions