Karen Horney

Karen Horney (1885-1952) was a German-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who built most of her career in the United States. She is usually classified as a neo-Freudian. Her importance lies in challenging the idea that psychological differences between men and women come directly from biology. She traced them instead to culture and society, an argument that anticipated much later feminist psychology.

She was born in Blankenese, near Hamburg, into a strict Protestant household. Her father was a Norwegian ship's captain, and her mother, with whom she was close, lived in a climate of domestic tension. From an early age she wanted to study medicine, which was unusual for a woman of her time. She enrolled at the University of Freiburg in 1906, studied at Göttingen and Berlin, and qualified as a doctor in 1911. That same year she had married Oskar Horney, and they would have three daughters. She began analysis with Karl Abraham, but left it when he attributed her sexual difficulties to repressed incestuous wishes toward her father. Horney rejected that reading and became a sharp critic of this part of psychoanalytic thought.

In 1920 she joined the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, a pioneer in organizing training through personal analysis, systematic theory and supervised case work. In these years she published on female psychology and questioned penis envy as a universal explanation. She argued that the inferiority attributed to women has cultural roots, and suggested that men, in turn, feel a parallel envy of women's capacity to bear children. Her husband's business collapse, her brother's death and several depressive episodes marked this period.

In 1932 she emigrated to the United States with one of her daughters, accepted an invitation from Franz Alexander to work in Chicago and soon settled in New York. There she published The Neurotic Personality of Our Time in 1937, a book that reached a wide readership. She held that basic anxiety arises from early relationships with parents and that neuroses take shape through defensive strategies. In 1941 she left the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and founded her own association and training institute, objecting to the strict, orthodox character of the psychoanalytic community.

After her death in 1952 her ideas were relatively neglected for more than a decade. The 1967 publication of Feminine Psychology, a collection of essays from her early years, revived her reputation as a pioneer of psychoanalytic feminism. Maslow counted her among the founders of humanistic psychology, and some of her descriptions appear in the DSM-IV in connection with personality disorders.