Karen Horney 1885-1952, American psychiatrist, b. Germany, M.D. Univ. of Berlin, 1913. She married Oscar Horney in 1909. Prior to her arrival (1932) in the United States, she was secretary of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she taught for 12 years. Associate director (1932-34) of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Horney then came to New York City, where she lectured at the New School for Social Research. She deviated from orthodox Freudian analysis by emphasizing environmental and cultural, rather than biological, factors in the genesis of neurosis. Anxiety, she held, is created by anything that jeopardizes a person's means of gaining security. The neurotic's rigid adherence to his safety devices protects him in some ways but renders him helpless toward other possible dangers. To further her work based on these beliefs, she founded (1941) and became dean of the American Institute of Psychoanalysis. Her works include The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), Self-Analysis (1942), Our Inner Conflicts (1945), and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950).

Bibliography: See studies by S. Quinn (1988), M. Westkott (1988), and B. J. Paris (1994).

Karen Danielsen Horney

The German-born American psychoanalyst Karen Danielsen Horney (1885-1952) was a pioneer of neo-Freudianism. She believed that every human being has an innate drive toward self-realization and that neurosis is essentially a process obstructing this healthy development.

Born in Hamburg on Sept. 16, 1885, Karen Horney received her medical and psychiatric education in Berlin. Her medical practice began in 1913, and then she taught in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (1918-1932). She participated in many international congresses in which Sigmund Freud was the leading figure, but being influenced by the new currents of 20th-century science, she increasingly questioned some of Freud's ideas.

In 1932 Horney went to Chicago, III., where she served as associate director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute until 1934. Then she taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute until 1941, when she made her definitive move away from the Freudian group. She took the lead in founding the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis; she was the founding dean (1941-1952) of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis and the founding editor (1941-1952) of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

In Europe Horney contributed to psychoanalysis in papers dealing mainly with the field of feminine psychology. She opposed Freud's idea that penis envy and the rejection of femininity were the basic factors in woman's psychology, that her wishes for a child and for a man were merely a conversion of her unsatisfied wish for a penis.

Between 1937 and 1951 Horney, a person of remarkable aliveness and dedication, was at the peak of her creative life. While practicing and teaching psycho-analysis, she wrote many articles and five books in which she presented the development of her psychoanalytic concepts.

In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) Horney expressed the view that neuroses are generated by cultural disturbances and conflicts which the person has experienced in accentuated form mainly in childhood, in which he did not receive love, guidance, respect, and opportunities for growth. She described the neurotic character structure as a dynamic process with basic anxiety, defenses against anxiety, conflict, and solutions to conflict as its essential elements.

In New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939) Horney presented her major differences with Freud. While continuing to adhere to the fundamental importance of unconscious forces, inner conflicts, free association, dreams, the analytic relationship, and neurotic defenses in psychoanalysis, she rejected Freud's concepts of the role of instincts in health and emotional illness. She saw aggression and sexual problems as the result of neurotic development rather than its cause.

In Self-analysis (1942) Horney indicated the possibilities, limitations, and specific ways in which people can change through increasing self-awareness.

Horney focused on the central position of conflict and solutions to conflict in neurosis in Our Inner Conflicts (1945). She saw the neurotic child feeling helpless and isolated in a potentially hostile world, seeking a feeling of safety in compulsive moves toward, against, and away from others. Each of these moves came to constitute comprehensive philosophies of life and patterns of interpersonal relating. The conflict between these opposed moves she called the basic conflict and recognized that it required the individual to resort to means for restoring a sense of inner unity. These means she called the neurotic solutions.

Neurosis and Human Growth (1950) was Horney's definitive work, in which she placed her concept of healthy development in the foreground. She viewed the real self as the core of the individual, the source of inherent, constructive, evolutionary forces which under favorable circumstances grow and unfold in a dynamic process of self-realization. She presented "a morality of evolution, " in which she viewed as moral all that enhances self-realization and as immoral all that hinders it. The most serious obstacle to healthy growth was the neurotic solution, which she called self-idealization, the attempt to see and to mold oneself into a glorified, idealized, illusory image with strivings for superiority, power, perfection, and vindictive triumph over others. This search for glory inevitably leads the individual to move away from himself (alienation) and against himself (self-hate). "At war with himself, " his suffering increases, his relationships with others are further impaired, and the self-perpetuating neurotic cycle continues.

Horney died in New York on Dec. 4, 1952. She had helped to lay the groundwork for the Karen Horney Clinic, which was established in 1955.

Further Reading

Analytic and critical discussions of Karen Horney's ideas are in Ruth L. Munroe, Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought: An Exposition, Critique, and Attempt at Integration (1955); "The Holistic Approach" by Harold Kelman in Silvano Arieti, ed., American Handbook of Psychiatry, vol. 2 (1959); and "Karen Horney" by Jack L. Rubins in Alfred M. Freedman and Harold I. Kaplan, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (1967). An important background study is Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970).

Additional Sources

Horney, Karen, The adolescent diaries of Karen Horney, New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Paris, Bernard J., Karen Horney: a psychoanalyst's search for self-understanding, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Quinn, Susan, A mind of her own: the life of Karen Horney, New York: Summit Books, 1987; Reading, Massachussetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1988.

Rubins, Jack L., Karen Horney: gentle rebel of psychoanalysis, New York: Dial Press, 1978. □

HORNEY, KAREN 1885-1952

Psychoanalyst

From Germany to the United States

On 22 September 1932 a German psychoanalyst who was to influence American psycho-therapy and personality theory greatly arrived in the United States. Dr. Karen Horney accepted a job offer from her former student, Hungarian analyst Franz Alexander, as assistant director of his newly established Psychoanalytic Institute in Chicago. Horney received her M.D. degree at the University of Freiburg in 1913 and underwent psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham, a friend and close associate of Sigmund Freud. She enjoyed her life in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, but the 1929 Wall Street crash with its resulting economic hardship and the growth of Nazism encouraged her to accept Alexander's offer. Horney worked briefly at the Chicago institute and then moved to New York City, where she joined the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The New School for Social Research had set up a University of Exile for German academics threatened by Hitler's 1933 rise to power, and Horney was invited to teach there. Her lectures became popular, and although her appealing lecture style was interrupted by endless smoking, students hung onto her every word. Her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), attracted attention, too.

Karen Horney versus Sigmund Freud

Her lectures and book critiqued Freud's male-biased view of feminine psychology. Where Freud felt that neurosis came from social repression of instinct, Horney argued it came instead from the parents' attitudes in socializing the child. If a child was not dealt with warmly by its parents, it might express its frustration through anger. If parents met that anger with more intimidation, the child was likely to suppress its feelings of rage. Horney taught that neurosis was motivated by these "basic anxieties" rather than having its genesis in childhood sexuality. She was more optimistic than Freud, who believed that some degree of neurosis was inevitable given the conflict between instinct and conscience and between the individual and society. Horney argued that people were always capable of growth and change and were capable of fending for themselves and meeting their needs on their own.

Conflicts with Psychoanalysts

Horney was soundly criticized for abandoning Freud's theory of infantile sexuality even though she agreed with him that neurosis did not stem from anything internal to the child but came from external abuse of the child by its caregivers. In 1939 she published her second book, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, where she further broke from Freudian orthodoxy and suggested major revisions in psychoanalytic therapy, which was rejected by analysts at the time. Ironically, many later adopted her suggestions, particularly her insistence that it was just as important in therapy to deal with the real-life, present-day problems as it was to reconstruct childhood emotional states and fantasies.

Future Acclaim

Her critiques of Freud and the popularity of both her writing and her teaching alienated her fellow teachers in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and by late 1939 the stage was set for her future break with the institute. After her break she helped to found the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. In later decades Horney's work received increased attention, especially from feminists and psychoanalysts interested in self-esteem.

Sources:

Bernard J. Paris, Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self-Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994);

Susan Quinn, A Mind of Her Own. The Life of Karen Horney (New York: Summit Books, 1987);

Jack L. Rubins, Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis (New York: Dial, 1978);

Janet Sayers, Mothers of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1991).