The Characteristic Neurotic Need

The basic anguish impels the clinging to attached and salvific ties (codependent, looking for dependent people to protect) and totems, ideals that provide existential security. An endless number of flags of different colors, with the common denominator of Duty.

Assertions such as: "You have to do things as they should be" are internalized, an "ethical" expression, more agnostic than the alternative: "You have to do it as God commands." An abstract entity, a kind of omnipresent "eye," knows what is right, what is pertinent and appropriate, within a codex with a behavior to follow as a railway.

Some of my behaviors I do because it seems to me that it is what should be done. For example, I am managed; I like to have all my papers in order, service payments, credit cards. I have no debts—they cause me discomfort, guilt, and stress. It is easy for me to pay my things on time because, from my vision, it is what proceeds. I have my house as a house should be: tidy, clean. My clothes... I like to control everything, and I know it's rigidity, and at the same time, it gives me peace of mind. It makes me feel good. It's like having a code of ethics, like feeling like a good citizen who doesn't bother anyone.

That entity, which can be replaced by a force of mine, perhaps in the form of a cohesive mass by an omnipotent leadership and a clear and luminous north, offers something that is priceless: Certainty.

It is necessary to understand the underlying dynamics of this "must," this inflated and contaminated "must," where being transmutes into what should be, generating a lifestyle of

iron adherence to the rules inscribed on fire in the psyche. We will now point out the aspects that weave together the reticular formation of this «matrix» compulsion to fulfill one's duty.

"Oughtism" and Control

The need for control operates as a foundation where all internal traffic lights are synchronized and automated to prevent any internal threat (emotions, spontaneous expressions of self-affirmation or aggressiveness, and, of course, experiences of a sexual nature) or external threats, omnipresent in the dangerous jungle of life.

The greater the control of spontaneity, the less possibility of error and, therefore, of punishment. The greater the "must," the more apparent security (pseudo-security).

Renunciation of Self

The drama of «shouldism» is its fatuity, its illusory and virtual aspect. It also requires a huge resignation—the resignation of Being, to the most genuine parts of oneself (creative impulses, instincts, enjoyment, surrender to life, intimacy, relaxed flow...).

It implies an enormous over-adaptation and a forgetfulness of one's own feelings, disregarding one's perceptions and intuitions.

Ego Ideal and Internal Enmity

Enormous self-control is exercised for the sake of an unattainable ideal of being. Not only exhausting for being insatiable but for being a devastating critical eye, which makes the social fearful a true enemy of themselves. That is their main drama: self-rejection, self-persecution, self-censorship, and self-repression.

Energy moves from what is essential (the body, feelings, creativity...) towards a world of heroic ideals and strenuous suffering. One does what one must, in obedience to externalized authorities.

I chase myself to do it well, to meet my own standards as if they were valid; I self-sabotage, I repress myself. I want to be obedient. I submit to my ideals and to whom I give authority.

Functions of Duty

This dynamic brings benefits: acceptance and recognition, and the palliation of radical insecurity. From the lack of a genuine anchorage, the Social 6 rushes to "embrace" totems like gigantic trees where they can rest in the certainty of chronic anguish.

Internalized codes of conduct minimize the feared rejections and also appease the internal conscience, which is not a relaxed, loving observer but an abusive judge in devitalizing processes, full of devaluation and self-contempt.

Roots of the Sense of Duty

The roots of the exacerbated sense of duty reside in the interruption of the most genuine needs of the human being: acceptance, permission, warmth, protection, reassuring physical contact, and the feeling of being anchored, rooted in hands, a body, a chest, a musicality of reception of the world.

The interruptions take place in an atmosphere of dictation, with different forms of invasion and coercion. The boy or girl learns to disconnect. Genuine needs are excluded and replaced by dictates and rules of conduct that sculpt a corporal and psychomotor “rigidification” and a freezing of emotional experiences. This concludes in the internalization, with chisel and hammer, of what is correct, acceptable, or allowed to feel and express.

These human sculptures endure an “emptying” of being that causes an energetic drag towards the mental, the normative, the ideal. The outcome is supreme surrender, self-forgetting in prostration at the service of duty. As though endowed with a sixth sense, the nervous system specializes in being a channel for receiving family dictates and values.

Alienation and "Foreignness"

In short, there is a movement of alienation, of estrangement, where one becomes a «foreigner» to oneself, turning exalted eyes towards the outside, sharpening attention to scan the standards that one will comply with in order to be loved.

The ideal of being, the ideal self, or, what is the same, the fulfillment of knowledge of what should be, will cover one's need for love and protection. If I comply, if I'm good, if I'm what you expect.

The E6 Duty traveler finds itself uprooted, deep down, from nourishing footholds and is drifting. Radical insecurity is associated with ancestral taboos, forbidden apples, and the tree of good and evil that split Paradise in two, dissociating life itself.

The corporal universe was impregnated with bars, turning the innocent and genuine impulses into Pandora's boxes with rusty locks. The dark pulpits of annihilating voices created menacing minotaurs that had to be locked up and gagged.

Absence of the Right to Be

Within the walls, there was a howl of fear in its purest form, which no one heard. Faced with solitary defenselessness, there was no other option than to leave the labyrinth transmuted into a uniformed being, a puppet pulled by the strings of duty.

From the primal cry that was no longer heard, from the deep feeling of abandonment and lack of permission for spontaneity and curiosity, springs the intimate feeling of simply not having the right to be.

I remember that at a party, when I commented on something, my dad pinched me, and every time I was going to speak, I looked at him to see if he approved, and if not, then I didn’t. I felt that I had to obey because he knew more than I did, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself or have my dad stop loving me because of my clumsiness when I gave my opinion. I didn’t have his permission, and I think I stopped myself too. He didn’t let me be spontaneous, so I preferred to keep quiet and not comment.

When I do speak, I do it with my certainties, with judgments, and inside, I have endless, manipulative dialogues filled with fear, insecurity, and mistrust. That’s when I need someone else’s opinion, even though many times I realize they don’t know—and that I do. It feels like not having the right to be.

Normality and Overexertion

The Social 6 emerges from the horror vacui and the fear of exclusion through self-forgetting and alienation, robotized by the ideal as the guide of life, with a displacement of phenomenological contact toward the mental. Life is thus confined to a series of square meters, calculated and measured with a judicial coloring, where good and bad acts exist.

There is only one way out: the line of duty, a desperate refuge. Digging one’s nails into safety totems, crying out for calm. Hunting for norms through amplified sensors, until hitting the key and adhering to normality.

In its fall, in its surrender, a mechanization occurs where routines are intertwined with strenuous activities, always under the magnifying glass of Reason. Rationalism and exacerbated moralism generate a deep distrust of impulses and spontaneity.

As Karen Horney points out, the "tyranny of shoulds," that judicial universe of codes and sentences, holds within it the idealized image of the self, the ingested family expectations, and the prevailing values and norms. Titanic in obeying these imperatives, the Social 6 incarnates Sisyphus, forcefully carrying the enormous boulder in an interminable calvary.

The overexertion implied by compulsive obedience to duty generates, because it is unsustainable, an internal defeat that leads to self-rejection. The statement by Bernard J. Paris is clarifying:

The shoulds constitute the foundation of the pact that the individual establishes with his destiny. Regardless of the solution each person adopts, their pact is that their demands will be met if they live up to their ‘shoulds.’ This is how they magically try to control external reality by obeying their internal dictates.

Self-Rejection

Paris describes the radical suffering caused, and above all, the self-persecution—the summary judgment toward oneself with self-absorbed hatred.

Self-hatred is the end product of intrapsychic defenses, each of which tends to magnify feelings of inadequacy and failure. In essence, self-hatred is the rage that the idealized self feels toward the self that one really is, for not being the way it should be. In Neurosis and Maturity, Horney pointed out that self-hatred is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the human mind. The human being, by tending toward the infinite and the absolute, also begins to destroy himself. When he makes a pact with the devil that promises him glory, he condemns himself to hell—that is, to the hell within him.

Duty and Responsibility

To feel belonging and approval, the correctness of manners and the mask of seriousness and responsibility are amplified. This manifests as manipulative pseudo-responsibility.

The striving walker of this characterology carries out his vital itinerary with a high concept of responsibility. This word becomes a “backpack full of heavy stones” that represent the norms and ideals of obligatory compliance. As Paris points out:

Horney noted that the neurotic person's shoulds and demands lead them to feel responsible for things over which they have no control, and that the object of therapy is to free them from their illusions and compulsions, so they can assume their true responsibilities.

With the tyrannical weight of duty, the concept of vital responsibility inflates and magnetizes unaffordable demands, resulting in an “over-responsibility.”

Renounce Pleasure

A punitive self-observation with patterns of demand and perfectionism makes it difficult to adapt to the environment and, above all, to achieve a feeling of personal satisfaction.

Concern for rules, scrupulousness, and moral inflexibility, as well as the repression of affective manifestations and a refuge in productivity and work achievements, lead to high levels of stress and anxiety.

Being a prisoner of a severe and inflexible conscience and suffering from the tyranny of an exacerbated sense of duty, the life of the Social 6 becomes a heavy burden, where fear of failure, unmet expectations, and making mistakes become overwhelming threats.

The reigning judicial mind leads the Social 6 to be exaggeratedly normative. They allow themselves very few "weaknesses," but unlike the E1, it is not the search for improvement that drives their self-demand but a strongly internalized sense of duty.

The value of life, measured by the sum of pleasure, is deemed less certain. This is bitterly declared in Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who best embodied the passion for duty in his life and work. His well-known formulation of the categorical imperative is perhaps the most elaborate form of submission to the conscience of duty. Thomas de Quincey describes Kant thus:

No mime or self-indulgence found quarter in Kant. At precisely a quarter to five, winter or summer, Lampe, Kant's lackey who had formerly served in the army, marched to his master's room with the bearing of a sentinel on duty and

shouted loudly, in a military tone: "Mr. Professor, the time has come." Kant invariably obeyed this order without delay, like a soldier obeying a command; never, under any circumstances, did he allow himself a moment's respite, not even after a sleepless night. As the clock struck five, Kant was seated at the breakfast table.

This internal judge takes its most exacerbated form in the religious renewal movements of 15th-century Germany, such as Pietism, initiated by Philipp Jakob Spener (1634–1705), as an evangelical reaction against the intellectualism and formalism dominant in Lutheran and Calvinistic traditions. It was precisely this Pietism, through maternal influence, that inspired Kant’s early formation.

For this religious conception, an objective and “external” fulfillment of precepts and duties is insufficient; instead, it focuses on feelings and moral rigor, emphasizing personal dedication to God. Pietism takes possession of man in his entirety—his intentions and convictions—exercising implacable vigilance over the "heart," where no emotion or interior movement, no matter how hidden, escapes its watchful eye and meticulous control. This provides fertile ground for the emergence of the Social 6, of which Germany represents a national stereotype.

Paradoxically, socially fearful individuals often inspire confidence and security in others. Perhaps this confidence arises from their adherence—sometimes "fanatical"—to certain ideals. Social 6s usually have a phlegmatic appearance, which serves as a facade for their profound internal fear. This corresponds to the image of the impassive gunman facing an enemy in a Western.

This subtype has a compulsive need for "balance," deeply afraid that any concession to impulse might be seen as "excessive." The classic motto of Greek culture, "Nothing in excess," seems to have been made expressly for them. Cassirer, in his biography of Kant, speaks of his innate inclination toward "severe restraint," and De Quincey describes him as follows:

Kant often spoke of himself as a gymnastic artist who had spent nearly eighty years balancing on the tightrope of life, never once leaning to the right or left.

Normativity

All these characteristics reflect a sensitivity to capture the norms of the environment. Social 6s have authentic radars that lead them to act as compulsive adaptation machines.

Their minds become a policing space, like an inspector establishing guidelines that resemble reminders of pending issues. Duty always prevails over pleasure. Many feel the irruption of restlessness even in moments of leisure. Free time, too, is strained by being repurposed for loftier objectives.

The internal mantra of "I must be this or that; do this or that" is constant. They feel the presence of a clock emitting a dense, heavy ticking—a stopwatch pressing down, scrutinizing and threatening what remains undone or in need of improvement. These internal orders create tensions that affect both mind and body.

The Social 6 is condemned to serve an external authority, but one so deeply internalized—embedded in the stomach—that, in a chronic pendulum of coming and going, the internal jailer projects its critical and judgmental eyes outward onto others.

Duty and Will

Through the idealized value of the will, Social 6s are fully available to fulfill what must be done, becoming laborious automata. Without effort, their internal sensation is that things lose value. Thus, their greatest satisfactions do not stem so much from achievements or activities filled with enjoyment but from the secret pleasure of fulfilling "what is due."

The "shoulds," as Karen Horney pointed out, constitute vital rails. Their consequence is the loss of freedom and a panic about making decisions, as choosing one option implies the possibility of making mistakes or failing to meet the expectations of their environment (workgroup, boss, partner, etc.). Making a decision entails the risk of being wrong in front of those who accept or reject them.

David Shapiro, in his work on "neurotic styles," highlights that the obsessive-compulsive personality avoids the act of decision-making. For someone driven by a feeling of pressure and guided by moral directives—a rigid soldier devoted solely to duty and isolated from their own desires—the act of deciding, which by nature revolves around needs and desires and usually brings a sense of freedom and choice, becomes terribly uncomfortable.

Ontic Void

In short, the heavy rules relax that intimate place where the anguish of not having permission to simply "be" resides. From this helplessness, a desperate impulse lifts them toward norms and ideals injected with certainties.

Social 6s are like Sisyphus, pushing stones in pain while embracing them, clinging to them as they fill the feared void and nullity. This nullity is understood in terms of "not being," since they had to go to church, had to renounce, and had to become the person installed in the minds of their father or mother. Nullity is also experienced as alienation, as they live by adhering to the codes of other people's lives.

In doing so, they lose themselves on the path of maturation, forgetting their body, impulses, pleasure, and desire. Like Icarus, they burn themselves out, falling into exhaustion and becoming ill from the compulsive effort to chase unattainable, chimerical ideals.

Ideal to Be

Idealization often presents itself in an attitude of "chivalry," a willingness to serve a noble or "lofty" ideal. Often, they also idealize relationships, feeling obligated to be noble and chivalrous as Social 6s.

This idealization sometimes leads them to “stoically endure” life's difficulties, as if endurance itself had become their weapon, given their difficulty in connecting with genuine aggression.