Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain delineates what happens when we become alienated from our real selves as a result of a pathogenic environment. This paper examines the defensive strategies that the principal characters employ when their fundamental needs for safety, love, belonging and esteem have been turned into insatiable neurotic needs as a result of having been thwarted. Nanda Kaul, Raka and Ila Das, the trio that make for the story of deprivation and depravity, try to cope with their basic anxiety by adopting a compliant or self-effacing solution and moving toward people, by adopting an aggressive or expansive solution and moving against people, or by becoming detached or resigned and moving away from people. Healthy people move appropriately and flexibly in all three directions, but in neurotic development these moves become compulsive and indiscriminate. Neurosis is seen as essentially a disturbance in human relationships which apparently envelops all three characters in general. This disturbance creates basic anxiety against which they defend themselves by employing the interpersonal and intra-psychic strategies of defense. In each interpersonal defense, one element involved in basic anxiety gets overemphasized: helplessness in the compliant solution, hostility in the aggressive solution, and isolation in the detached solution. Under pathogenic conditions, all these feelings are likely to occur, leading the principal characters to make all three of the defensive moves and giving rise to what is termed as the `basic conflict'.

People have a veritable self that requires favorable conditions to be actualized. When they are motivated by their defensive strategies instead of their genuine feelings, they become alienated from their real selves. Karen Horney is perhaps the first humanistic psychoanalyst who worked on this phenomenon. She divided defensive strategies into two kinds: interpersonal, which we use in our dealings with other people, and intra-psychic, which we employ in our own minds. The central feature of neurosis is alienation from the real self because of oppressive forces in the environment. The real self is not a fixed entity but a set of intrinsic potentialities including temperament, talents, capacities and predispositions that are part of our genetic makeup and need a favorable environment in which to evolve. It is not a product of learning, because one cannot be taught to be oneself; but neither is it impervious to external influence, because it is actualized through interactions with an external world that can show many ways of development. While interpersonal difficulties create the moves toward, against, and away from people and the conflicts between them, concomitant intra-psychic problems produce their own defense strategies. Self-idealization generates what Horney calls the `pride system', which includes neurotic pride, neurotic claims, tyrannical shoulds, and increased self denigration.

The principal characters in Fire on the Mountain, Nanda Kaul, Raka and Ila Das drift between the two planes—on an outer plane they grapple with the interpersonal relationships that take a neurotic turn and deny them contentment in relationships; on an inner plane, they fight within with the intra-psychic problems that pose challenges and disquiet, and compel them to adopt certain defense mechanisms that lend respite from the seething and simmering self. The idealized image created as a consequence, generates the pride system which becomes a kind of Frankenstein's monster that hates and seeks to destroy its creator. This pride system affects how we interact with others. It poisons all our relationships and makes it extremely difficult for them to be a source of healing or growth.

English Studies Journal, Intra-Psychic Defense Mechanisms, Anita Desai, Humanistic Psychoanalyst, Neurotic Development, Familial Obligations, Biological Limitations, Psychological Limitations, Foreign Universities, English Governesses.