Karen Horney

Karen Horney, née Karen Danielsen (born September 16, 1885, Blankenese, near Hamburg, Germany--died December 4, 1952, New York, New York, U.S.), German-born American psychoanalyst who, departing from some of the basic principles of Sigmund Freud, suggested an environmental and social basis for the personality and its disorders.

Karen Danielsen studied medicine at the universities of Freiburg, Göttingen, and Berlin, taking her M.D. degree from the last in 1911. (In 1909 she married Oscar Horney, a lawyer, from whom she was separated in 1926 and divorced in 1937.) After a period of medical practice she became interested in psychoanalysis, and from 1913 to 1915 she studied and entered analysis with Karl Abraham, a close associate and disciple of Sigmund Freud. From 1915 to 1920 she engaged in clinical and outpatient psychiatric work in connection with Berlin hospitals, and in 1920 she joined the teaching staff of the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

Although she adhered in the main to the outlines of Freudian theory, Horney early began to disagree with Freud's view of female psychology, which he treated as an offshoot of male psychology. Unaffected by the worshipful awe that held many early Freudians to received dogma, she forthrightly rejected such notions as penis envy and other manifestations of male bias in psychoanalytic theory. She argued instead that the source of much female psychiatric disturbance is located in the very male-dominated culture that had produced Freudian theory. She introduced the concept of womb envy, suggesting that male envy of pregnancy, nursing, and motherhood--of women's primary role in creating and sustaining life--led men to claim their superiority in other fields.

In 1932 Horney went to the United States to become associate director of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. She moved to New York City in 1934 to return to private practice and teach at the New School for Social Research. There she produced her major theoretical works, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), in which she argued that environmental and social conditions, rather than the instinctual or biological drives described by Freud, determine much of individual personality and are the chief causes of neuroses and personality disorders. In particular, Horney objected to Freud's concepts of the libido, the death instinct, and the Oedipus complex, which she thought could be more adequately explained by cultural and social conditions. She believed that a primary condition responsible for the later development of neurosis was the infant's experience<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371312/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=131;key=false;kvqsegs=D,T,2887,2884,2777,1361,1358,1355,1353,1350,1344,1340;kvsource=health;kvtopicid=272054;kvchannel=SCIENCE;misc=1315681503268"></script>