Horney argued that a child who feels unsafe develops basic anxiety, and copes by moving toward, against, or away from people. Why did she regard these as strategies rather than as character defects?

B. Because each is a reasonable solution to the family that produced it.

Horney treated these as intelligible responses rather than symptoms: compliance works in a hostile household, aggression works where assertion gets heard, withdrawal works where neither does. What makes a trend neurotic is exclusivity rather than content, one move applied everywhere, including where it is no longer required. That relocates the problem to a solution that outlived its problem.