Naming cultural contradictions as neurosis triggers leaves deeper structural conflicts untouched.

Evidence

According to Horney’s bestselling books, the decisive contradictions in Western culture, which the neurotic experienced more intensely than a normal person and in coping with which needed support, were the contradictions between competition and brotherly love, between the stimulus of desires and the frustration of their satisfaction, and between the apparent freedom of the individual and the actual limitations on that freedom. These were contradictions which only brushed the surface of social conflicts and of the conflict between the individual and society, however. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 292

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘The therapy of the surface’ — how popular self-help psychology reframes structural conflict as an individual coping problem, using Horney as the historical hinge.
• XREF: connects to: Antillean neurosis is the product of a white-world-forming cultural situation, not of individual pathology; Colonial neurosis does not stem from a repressed personal trauma; Antillean neuroses stem from a white cultural situation imposed through media (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Antillean neurosis is the product of a white-world-forming cultural situation, not of individual pathology; Colonial neurosis does not stem from a repressed personal trauma; Antillean neuroses stem from a white cultural situation imposed through media (+2 more)