Background
Karen Horney (pronounced Horn-eye) was born
Karen Danielson in Blankenese, Germany on September 16, 1885 to Berndt and
Clotilde (Sonni) Danielson. Berndt was a Norwegian sea captain and was a strict
and religious man. Sonni, many years his junior, was a freethinker,
well-educated and from a prominent family.
Karen’s mother and older brother Berndt encouraged her to get an
education and in 1906, she became one of the first women to attend a German
university. At university, she studied medicine. In 1909, Karen married Oskar
Horney, who by some accounts was a social scientist and other accounts, a
lawyer. She gave birth to the first of three daughters in 1910 and graduated
with a medical degree in 1911.
Prompted by her pain over her mother’s death
in 1911, Karen entered psychoanalysis with Karl Abraham, a disciple of
Freud. It is said that she spent more
than 500 hours in analysis with him. Her
experience sparked her interest in psychoanalysis and she studied it with Abraham
from 1913-1915. In 1920, Karen helped to
found the Policlinic and Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. There she designed and directed therapeutic
programs, taught, treated patients, wrote and conducted research. In 1926, she separated from Oskar, taking her
children.
Karen first supported Freudian
psychoanalytic theory but as she soon diverged from the traditional. She became
interested in feminine psychology and female psychosexual development and
believed many of his theories to be wrong. She differed from “traditional”
psychoanalytic thought in areas such as female development, death instinct, and
the basis of personality. While Freud initially was supportive of Karen’s work,
he began to grow cold to her around 1931. That isolation, coupled with the rise
of the Nazi party, caused Karen to immigrate to the United States in 1932.
There, she helped found the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and two years
later, she moved to New York City to join the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute. In New York, she began to do
work on neurosis and self-analysis and in 1937, she and Oskar were divorced. In 1941, Karen left (or was expelled due to
her diverging views from traditional psychoanalysis) the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute and formed the Association for the Advancement of
Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She continued to teach
(notably at the New School for Social Research), write several books, treat
patients and founded the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, of which she was
the editor. Karen Horney died on
December 4, 1952 in New York City after a brief illness. She is buried in Ardsley, New York. After her
death, the Karen Horney Foundation was formed and the Karen Horney Clinic was
opened in New York City in 1955. The
clinic provides accessible mental healthcare to the public.
Work on Psychology
of Women
Karen Horney’s interest in the psychology of
women started soon after her introduction to psychoanalysis. At first, she embraced Freudian
psychoanalysis and even wrote a paper which she delivered in 1922 called “On
the Genesis of the Castration Complex”.
This paper supported the concepts of penis envy and the castration
complex in women. Very soon afterward
however, her views began to deviate from those of Freud.
Karen then theorized that if penis envy did
exist, it was a result of girls’ treatment of them by the parents and not, as
Freud proposed, an innate feeling of inferiority. In fact, she birthed (pun intended) the
concept of “womb envy”, men’s envy of women’s ability to get pregnant, nurse
and mother babies. She believed that it was this envy that caused men to claim
that they were the superior gender in other arenas, like providing for the
family or physical prowess.
Karen objected to male bias that permeated psychoanalysis.
In opposition to Freud’s emphasis on the importance of the relationship of
daughters to fathers in psychosexual development, Karen identified the
mother-daughter relationship as being paramount in a girl’s sexual and psychological
development.
Between 1923 and 1935, Karen wrote thirteen
important papers on feminine psychology.
These papers covered such topics as motherhood, masochism, marital
difficulties, masculinity complexes in women and the aforementioned envy of
women. These papers were published together in 1967 under the title Feminine Psychology.
References
Hyde, Janet Shibley.
(2006). Theoretical Perspectives, Half
the Human Experience The Psychology of Women (pp. 38-39). Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Posted by Sarah
Fisher
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