Person
Karen Horney
German-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, trained in Berlin and analysed by Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs. In the 1920s she was among the first to dispute Freud's account of female development, arguing that it reflected a masculine point of view. After she moved to the United States in 1932, she built a theory of neurosis around basic anxiety, the strategies people use against it and the idealized image of the self, giving culture and present relationships more weight than instinct. Her break with orthodox analysis in 1941 led her to found the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.
- Born
- 1885
- Died
- 1952
- Known for
- Influenced
- Ernest Jones
analysed by
- Karl Abraham 1910 Horney began analysis with Abraham in Berlin in 1910, while still a medical student and young wife.
- Hanns Sachs 1920 Horney's second analysis, with Sachs, came around 1920, when he had just begun training analyses at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.
critiqued
- Penis envy 1923 From her congress paper of 1922 onward Horney questioned the view that penis envy is primary and decisive for women, calling it unsatisfying for biological thinking and a product of masculine bias; by 1939 she read it as culturally reinforced.
- Oedipus complex 1939 Horney denied the Oedipus complex a biological basis, reading the child's attachment to a parent as a response to conditions in the family.
- Narcissism 1939 Horney rejected narcissism as a libidinal investment of the ego and redescribed it as self-inflation, a neurotic trend that stands in for lost self-esteem.
introduced
- Womb envy 1926 Horney's own word was Mutterschaftsneid, envy of motherhood; the English name womb envy came to be attached to the idea later.
- Basic anxiety 1937 Horney named basic anxiety in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and kept it as the starting point of her later theory of neurosis.
- Neurotic trends 1939 Horney proposed the term in New Ways in Psychoanalysis as a counterpart to Freud's instinctual drives, and in Our Inner Conflicts regrouped the trends into moving toward, against and away from people.