Psychological survey of personality types in Miral al-Tahawi's novel "Bazenjan Al-Zarqa" according to Karen Horney's theory

Miral al-Tahawi is an Egyptian contemporary writer who believes that the style of any writer denotes his or her social development and mental state. In the novel "Bazenjan Al-Zarqa", the writer's spirit is clearly evident in the characters of the story. She attempts to express a variety of religious and social suppressions against eastern woman. The characters of her novel have been analyzed in this article through a descriptive-analytical method and based on the psychological theory of Karen Horney, a prominent German psychologist. Horney has paid special attention to the subject of culture and environment in her psychoanalytic theories. The neurotic characters of the novel "Bazenjan Al-Zarqa" are entangled in a kind of neuroticism caused by their living environment and its specific attributes, which can be criticized and analyzed by psychological theories of Horney. This research seeks to examine the characters of the novel according to the three personality types of compliant, aggressive, and detached. Also, their ways of defending in the context of society is investigated. The results of the research show that among the five main characters that play roles in the story, except the father of the hero of the story, who has a normal personality type the other characters are in the group of neurotic and non-healthy personality types. Due to environmental and cultural damages, these characters suffer from radical anxiety that has led to the formation of abusive relationships among them.