Real self

The real self theory in politics and philosophy proposes that people often have a private "real will" (or real self), that is different from their public "expressed will".
Karen Horney distinguishes between : Whereas the "real self" has the potential for growth, it can degenerate to a "despised self" and, in a neurotic person, growth can be impeded by the hold of the idealised "ideal self". Horney writes of the neurotic: "His whole actual self became somewhat unreal to him and he created in its place an idealized image of himself in which the conflicting parts were so transfigured that they no longer appeared as conflicts but as various aspects of a rich personality."
Horney's view has been compared to Carl Rogers' notion of incongruence, according to which a person's "implicit organismic self" and their "explicit self-concept" differ. According to Rogers, persons can become more congruent if they experience unconditional positive regard and thereby come into contact with their natural organismic valuing of experience.
Similarly, D. W. Winnicotts spoke of the "true self and false self", the "true self" being a a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and the "false self" being a defensive facade.

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