Karen Horney

Karen Horney (née Danielsen) was born on 16 September 1885 in Blankenese, a prosperous suburb of Hamburg, to a Norwegian-German merchant-marine ship's captain Berndt Wackels Danielsen—a strict Protestant whose children nicknamed him 'the Bible-thrower' because he did indeed throw Bibles—and his Dutch-origin wife Clotilde, seventeen years his junior, intellectual but depressive and domineering toward her daughter. Karen had four older half-siblings from her father's first marriage but no contact with them, and developed an intense bond with her brother Berndt that gave way to depression when he rebuffed her adolescent affection. She kept diaries from age thirteen and decided on medicine when women were still formally barred from German universities. The doors opened in 1900 after a long campaign by women's rights groups; she entered the University of Freiburg medical school in 1906, transferred through Göttingen and Berlin, and earned her MD in 1911—among the very first generation of German women doctors and one of the first women to be psychoanalytically trained in Berlin.

In 1909, through fellow student Carl Müller-Braunschweig, she met and married business student Oskar Horney. From 1910 she entered analysis with Karl Abraham for 500 hours and then with Hanns Sachs, partly to cope with the birth of her first child and the near-simultaneous deaths of both her parents. In 1920 she was a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she lectured, researched, treated patients privately and helped design the training programme. In 1923 her husband's firm collapsed, her brother died young of a pulmonary infection, and she suffered a severe second depression—she swam out to sea on holiday contemplating suicide. She separated from Oskar in 1926 and divorced in 1937, raising their three daughters largely alone.

From 1923 to 1935 she published thirteen papers on feminine psychology that frontally attacked Freud's 'penis envy.' She argued that female anxiety is not primary biological lack but a secondary envy of the cultural devaluation of femininity, and that men show a counterpart 'womb envy' for women's procreative capacity—their drive to social achievement often compensating for the inability to bear and nurture children. In 1932, with Nazism rising and Freud's coolness toward her growing, she accepted Franz Alexander's invitation to become his assistant at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, then moved to Brooklyn in 1934. There she joined Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm and Clara Thompson to form the neo-Freudian Cultural School. Her affair with Fromm began intellectually and ended bitterly.

The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) reached a wide popular audience and made her famous outside the analytic guild. New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), Self-Analysis (1942)—one of the first serious self-help books in the modern sense—Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and her final masterwork Neurosis and Human Growth (1950) developed her own personality theory: ten neurotic needs (for affection, power, exploitation, recognition, admiration, achievement, self-sufficiency, perfection, narrow life, and a partner who solves all problems) organised into three orientations—moving toward people (compliance), moving against (aggression), and moving away (withdrawal). The neurotic personality is ruled by what she called the 'tyranny of the shoulds,' driven by the gap between real and ideal self into a hopeless 'search for glory' in which self-hate alternates with grandiose perfectionism. The expansive solution she further subdivided into narcissistic, perfectionistic and arrogant-vindictive types, and she described co-dependent 'morbid dependency' relationships between arrogant-vindictive and self-effacing partners. Her insistence that self-realisation is the healthy person's life aim—the discovery of one's 'real self' rather than the inflation of an idealised one—anticipated Abraham Maslow's humanistic psychology a decade later.

The shadow side is real. In 1941, doctrinal conflict with the orthodox Freudian core of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute led to her demotion from training analyst status; she walked out with Sullivan, Fromm, Thompson and Kardiner to found the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and its training arm, the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, where she served as Dean. Yet doctrinal infighting flared at the new institute too—Sullivan and Fromm broke off in 1943 to form the William Alanson White Institute, leaving Horney once again with a smaller circle than she had hoped to lead. She was a powerful founder who could not hold her followers in one camp, and her authoritative classroom style alienated as many junior analysts as it inspired. From the mid-1930s she stopped writing on feminine psychology and never resumed; biographer Janet Sayers concluded she was 'far too much of an individualist ever to engage in collective political struggle, feminist or otherwise.' Her late-life engagement with Zen Buddhism through D. T. Suzuki—she travelled to Japan in 1952 shortly before her death to visit Zen monasteries—pointed toward an Eastern source for her self-realisation theory, but the integration was incomplete when she died of gallbladder cancer in New York on 4 December 1952. The Karen Horney Clinic, opened in her honour on 6 May 1955 in New York City, still provides low-cost psychotherapy grounded in her theory and trains clinicians for the American Institute for Psychoanalysis she co-founded.