My Three Styles in Horney’s Scheme — A Stoic Practice v0.3

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

My Three Styles in Horney’s Scheme — A Stoic Practice v0.3

Version note: v0.3 supersedes v0.2 and v0.1, both discarded. The changes from v0.1 are as follows. The document is written in the first person, as my own practice. It uses Horney’s own labels for the three movements: Withdrawing, Compliant and Expansive. The root dogmas and propositions are taken from the Character Dogma Register (CDR) v2.1 as published at pstyles.com, and they replace the dogmas v0.1 invented. The Inventive style is placed as Expansive and credited as my extension of the typology from the Compensatory Narcissistic construct, not as an Oldham style. Horney’s scheme is admitted as the frame, on stated terms. An Origin section is added: the three styles, and my reading of them together within Horney’s scheme, are long-standing, and what is new as of 24 September 2026 is the Stoic practice joined to that reading.

The commitments are cited in canonical sequence: C1 Substance Dualism, C2 Libertarian Free Will, C3 Ethical Intuitionism, C4 Foundationalism, C5 Correspondence Theory, C6 Moral Realism.

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I. The Beginning

Everyone wants happiness. Incomplete happiness is not worth accepting if complete happiness is available. Complete happiness must lie wholly within my control. Only my assent lies wholly within my control. Happiness is therefore correct assent, and my assent is correct when it matches the truth about value: only virtue is good, and only vice is evil.

Every rule in this document is derived from that chain.

II. Origin

Nothing in my view of myself is new. For many years I have seen myself as Solitary, Devoted and Inventive, and I have read the three together through Horney’s movements. The Solitary moves away from people, the Devoted moves toward them, and the Inventive moves above them. Each style also has its own entry in the Character Dogma Register, published style by style at PStyles.

What is new, as of 24 September 2026, is joining that reading to Stoic practice. Two things are new:

• Each movement’s claims are taken as a proposition from the register and corrected by the chain in Section I.
• The evening recovery audit is run against all three styles together.

Part of this practice is invented and part is discovered.

• Invented: the procedure itself. That is the audit, the collision map, and the check for the shared node.
• Discovered: the value truths the procedure applies. That only virtue is good, and that each style’s claims are false, is found, not made (C6). The propositions the audit works on were already in the register.

The practice is new, so it has no record yet. The worked case in Section IX is illustrative, and the audit and the shared-node step have not been tested. My own evening audits will confirm or strike them.

III. The Frame

Horney sorted character into three movements: toward people, against people, and away from people. In Neurosis and Human Growth she named them the Compliant, the Expansive and the Withdrawing (Resigned) solutions. My three primary styles fall one under each:

• Withdrawing: Solitary. I move away from people.
• Compliant: Devoted. I move toward people.
• Expansive: Inventive. I move above people, toward an image of superiority.

I admit Horney’s frame on three terms.

• A movement is not a cause. It names the direction of a habituated pattern of judgment. As the register states, a style narrows the search for my false value judgments. It never excuses one and never predicts my next assent. I originate my assent (C2).
• Nothing is unconscious. When I assent, the assent is conscious. What it seldom is, is explicit.
• The aim is not Horney’s. Her aim is the real self. Mine is the correct condition of my prohairesis.

On these terms, and as of this practice, Horney contributes something the register lacks: an account of how the styles are oriented toward other people. That orientation is what lets me see my three styles pulling in three different directions.

IV. One Faculty, Not Three

Horney pictures the movements as trends in conflict with each other at the same time. Chrysippus, as Plutarch reports him in De virtute morali, denies that picture. My ruling faculty is one, and it cannot assent to contradictory propositions at the same instant. When I feel torn three ways, the explanation is that I am assenting in rapid succession, first to one style’s claim, then to another’s, then to the third.

There is no Solitary part of me, no Devoted part and no Inventive part. There is one agent making successive assents, and each of them is his own act.

V. My Three Styles

1. Withdrawing: Solitary

• Root dogma (CDR): “Solitude and freedom from relational demand are genuine goods; others’ company and emotional claims are genuine evils.”
• Governing judgment: “Any relationship requiring reciprocal engagement is a genuine evil.”
• Correction: Solitude is an indifferent, and so is company. If being left alone were a good, it would depend on other people’s restraint, my circumstances, my health and my luck. When that arrangement fails and I am disturbed, the disturbance is the evidence that I had placed a good in the arrangement.
• What survives: Solitary work, few attachments, quiet, and long stretches alone. Nothing in the corpus requires company.
• The danger for me as a Stoic: Five of this style’s propositions read like Stoic doctrine. They are that being unmoved is good; that freedom from wanting to impress is good; that freedom from emotional involvement is good; that dispassion is good; and that indifference to pain and pleasure is good. Stoic apatheia is a consequence of valuing only virtue. This style pursues calm directly, by arranging its circumstances.
• The test: Can the self-sufficiency I have in mind be taken from me? If it can, it is the style’s programme of conduct, not the Stoic fact that the good lies in my own will.

2. Compliant: Devoted

• Root dogma (CDR): “Attachment to another person is the condition of completeness; separation is a genuine evil.”
• Correction: The other person is an external. So is the attachment, because it requires his continuing participation, which no act of my will can supply. Being attached and being alone are both indifferents.
• What survives: Loyalty, care, cooperation, deference where deference is owed, and a heavy share of a shared burden.
• The item that reaches furthest: “One’s own independent judgment is a genuine evil.” This proposition does more than misclassify an indifferent: it attempts to surrender the faculty itself. The surrender cannot be carried out. When I defer, I still assent, and the assent is mine.
• The near miss: Duty also says obey. The difference is that duty follows what is owed, while this style follows whoever is asking. The two coincide until the authority is wrong.

3. Expansive: Inventive

• Root dogma (CDR): “An image of superiority over others is a genuine good; being ordinary or actual is a genuine evil.”
• Correction: An image of me held in other men’s minds lies outside my control twice over. I do not possess the image, and I do not possess the minds that hold it. I can act, but I cannot determine what others make of my acting.
• What survives: Achievement, and excellent work that is complete when it is done, whether or not anyone notices it.
• The distinctive correction: This style values the idealized self and treats the actual self as evil. That inverts the truth. The actual self is where assent happens, so it is the only place virtue is available. The first proposition to strike is “self-knowledge revealing the gap between idealized and actual self is a genuine evil,” because it exists to keep the inversion hidden.
• My observation, not in the corpus: Horney’s idealized image runs through all three of her solutions. The register states it outright as this style’s organizing dogma.

VI. Where the Three Collide

The register holds that contradiction within a style is diagnostic. Contradiction between my three styles is diagnostic in the same way. Each collision below is a pair of claims that I assent to in alternation, never both at once.

• Solitary against Devoted. One style says others’ company is a genuine evil. The other says separation is a genuine evil. These are contrary claims about the same external.
• Solitary against Inventive. One style says praise is a genuine evil. The other says admiration is a genuine good.
• Devoted against Inventive. One style says my own independent judgment is a genuine evil. The other says being out-achieved is a genuine evil. One gives my judgment away; the other stakes everything on it.

The shared node. All three styles hold that criticism is a genuine evil:

• Solitary: “Praise and criticism are genuine evils.”
• Devoted: “Criticism is a genuine evil.”
• Inventive: “Others’ critical judgment and disapproval are genuine evils.”

So criticism is the occasion on which all three styles bid for my assent together. Because the proposition is shared, correcting it once removes the ground from under all three.

VII. Two Modes, No Interception

I correct in two modes only:

• Standing disposition: settled judgments that forestall the false impression without effort.
• Recovery audit: examining and correcting the assent after a pathos has occurred.

I do not attempt to screen every impression as it arrives. My one prospective stop is clause (b): when the urge to act is felt as a pathos, I can refrain from the act. That stop leaves the assent already given for the audit.

VIII. The Evening Recovery Audit

I take one incident from the day in which a pathos occurred.

• 1. Event. I state what happened, with no evaluative words.
• 2. Sequence. I list each claim that held the floor, in order. I mark each as Solitary, Devoted or Inventive, and match it to its proposition in the register.
• 3. Shared node. I check whether criticism was the occasion. If it was, I expect all three styles in the sequence and look for each.
• 4. Final assent. I identify which claim governed what I actually said or did.
• 5. True judgment. I assent to the true value judgment: “This is an external; only virtue is good.” That judgment is the ground under clause (c).
• 6. Resolve. I form a standing resolve about my conduct under clause (d). If nothing remains to be done, the resolve is the whole of the recovery.
• 7. Act. If an act is owed, I do it under clause (e).

IX. A Worked Case (Illustrative)

In a working group, a senior colleague calls my framework idiosyncratic. Within seconds three claims take the floor in turn:

• Inventive: being judged ordinary is an evil, so refute him.
• Devoted: his disapproval is an evil, so appease him.
• Solitary: this demand is an evil, so withdraw from the group.

Criticism is the shared node, which is why all three arrive together.

During the call, I feel the urge to answer at once, and under clause (b) I refrain.

That evening I run the audit:

• Governing assent: Devoted. I conceded a section I still judge accurate.
• True judgment: his disapproval is an external.
• Resolve (clause (d)): I will restore the section on its merits.
• Act (clause (e)): I send a short note to the group saying that section two stands, with the reason.

X. Failure Modes

• F1: Interception creep. A step becomes real-time screening of impressions. Return to Section VII.
• F2: Suspension for rejection. I withhold assent from a claim that is plainly false. The fault is that a clear value truth calls for assent.
• F3: Borrowed ground. The correction rests on human nature, social duty or wellbeing instead of on the chain in Section I.
• F4: Style as cause. I use a style to explain or excuse an assent. This contradicts C2.
• F5: Stoic-sounding dogma. I mistake one of the Solitary propositions that read like doctrine for doctrine itself.
• F6: Vocabulary without derivation. Corpus terms appear without a derivation behind them (the D2 failure mode). Only ratification can catch this.

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Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.