FREE ESSAY ON LOOKING BEYOND THE SEXES

LOOKING BEYOND THE SEXES

A woman gets pregnant, and her boyfriend leaves her. In Karen Horney's "The Distrust
Between the Sexes", she explains how a person's psychological history causes him/her to
distrust people of the opposite sex because of certain expectations they might have.
Longings for happiness, childhood reflections, and childhood conflicts are all things
that invent these expectations.
First off, people are longing for happiness, while setting their expectations at high.
Horney states, "All of our unconscious wishes, contradictory in their nature and
expanding boundlessly on all sides, are waiting here for their fulfillment" (341).
Children are raised to believe that relationships with the opposite sex are their doorway
to happiness. Horney says, "The partner is supposed to be strong, and at the same time
helpless, to dominate us and be dominated by us, to be ascetic and to be sensuous" (341).
People expect their partners to be too many things, which will lead them to
disappointment. Horney states, "We take the magnitude of such overvaluation for the
measure of our love, while in reality it merely expresses the magnitude of our
expectations" (341). Society's longing for happiness has so many expectations of what
love should be that, in the end, all one has is one's expectations. 
Next, childhood reflections cause a certain number of expectations that are handed down
by generations. Horney states, "Thus far, our reflections certainly have been neither new
nor specifically analytical and have often been better formulated in the past"(341).
Reflections that people have from their childhood carve the person into what they are as
an adult. Horney explains, "The paradise of childhood is most often an illusion with
which adults like to deceive themselves"(341). Adults remember their childhood as a
fantasy and try to live their lives around that fantasy. Horney says, "We need only
recall the capacity that children posses even in their very early years, for passionate
and instinctive sexual desires similar to those of adults and yet different from
them"(342). Children and adults are very different, but if a person finds the similarity,
it will help them throughout their lives.
Last, childhood conflicts give a person certain expectations of how the opposite sex will
treat a person. Horney states, "Let us further assume that the latter wish was repressed
due to anxiety from a guilty conscience; then we have here the fundamental constellation
for the formation of certain type of woman who is unable to relate to the male because
she fears that every male will suspect her of wanting something from him"(343). Children
have many conflicts, which affect part of their adult lives. Horney explains, "Or by
completely projecting onto him her repressed wishes, she will imagine that every male
merely intends to exploit her, that he wants from her only sexual satisfaction, after
which he will discard her"(343). If a person's opposite sex hurts them in any way, then
that person will believe that the opposite sex will always hurt them. Horney states, "Or
let us assume that a reaction formation of excessive modesty will mask the repressed
drive for power"(343). Children develop at different ages; therefore, modesty levels are
different for the opposite sex. 
Distrust between the opposite sexes is the effect from psychological history because of
certain standards and expectations people set for themselves and others. Expectations
that contribute to the distrust between the sexes are caused by longings for happiness,
childhood reflections, and childhood conflicts.