The concept of neurotic needs occupies a central position in Karen Horney’s mature theoretical architecture, and the depth-psychology corpus as a whole approaches it through the lens of compulsion, self-distortion, and the blockage of genuine self-realization. Horney, the dominant voice in any treatment of this term, understood neurotic needs not as mere intensifications of ordinary desires but as structurally distinct drives arising from the defensive enterprise of self-idealization. Where ordinary needs are flexible and reality-responsive, neurotic needs are compulsive, insatiable, and indifferent to the actual conditions of their fulfillment. They manifest as neurotic claims (entitlements to exceptional treatment), as the tyranny of the should (inner dictates requiring impossible self-perfection), and as the search for glory — all of which Horney systematically distinguishes from healthy striving. The crucial theoretical tension in the corpus runs between Horney’s intrapsychic account, which roots neurotic needs in the pride system and alienation from the real self, and interpersonal and object-relational perspectives that situate compulsive need in early relational disturbance. Freud’s libidinal framework, which Horney explicitly critiques, provides a counterpositional backdrop. Jung and Hillman enter adjacently, questioning whether the normative frame against which ‘neurotic’ need is measured is itself adequate. The stakes are clinical and humanistic: neurotic needs, left unaddressed, progressively colonize imagination, relationship, work, and the capacity for self-knowledge.