Looking Beyond the Sexes essays

Looking Beyond the Sexes essays A woman gets pregnant, and her boyfriend leaves her. In Karen Horneys The Distrust Between the Sexes, she explains how a persons 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). Societys longing for happiness has so many expectations of what love should be that, in the end, all one has is ones 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...