Karen Horney

Karen Danielsen grew up in Hamburg. Susan Quinn's biography A Mind of Her Own² follows her from her youth there. She was among the first women admitted to the study of medicine in Germany, and she studied at the universities of Freiburg, Göttingen and Berlin. In 1909 she married Oskar Horney, with whom she had three daughters; they separated in 1926.

In 1910 she began an analysis with Karl Abraham in Berlin. Around 1920 she was analysed again, by Hanns Sachs (A Mind of Her Own²). She was a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920 and belonged to it until she emigrated. Her papers on female psychology, which challenged the views of her own teachers, were written in her Berlin years.

In 1932 Franz Alexander invited Horney to be associate director of the newly founded Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 1934 she moved to New York and joined the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In the 1930s she had a long personal relationship with Erich Fromm. In the late 1930s she met Fromm, Sullivan and Clara Thompson as an informal discussion group in New York (Psychiatrist of America³).

Her first two American books were The Neurotic Personality of Our Time⁴ (1937) and New Ways in Psychoanalysis¹ (1939). The second criticised Freud's theory chapter by chapter and aroused resentment at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1941 the Institute disqualified her as a training analyst, and her break with the New York Psychoanalytic Society followed (A Mind of Her Own²).

That same year Horney founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, together with Fromm and others, and its training body, the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She was the Institute's dean until her death, and she founded the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and was its first editor. The new group soon split. In 1943 Fromm's training privileges were withdrawn because he was not a physician, and he left the Association; Sullivan and Thompson left with him. Quinn's account of these years shows the dissident group reproducing the autocracy it had fled (A Mind of Her Own²). Horney died in New York on 4 December 1952. The Karen Horney Clinic, a low-cost treatment centre, opened in New York in 1955.

Horney's first challenge to Freud was a paper she read at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin in 1922. It was published the following year as On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women⁵. Analysts had taken it as given that the castration complex in women springs from the girl's envy of the penis, and that many women are discontented with their sex. Horney asked whether this view owed its self-evidence to male narcissism. She also found it unsatisfying, for biological thinking, that half of humanity should be discontented with its sexual role.

She analysed the girl's envy into three components: urethral erotism, the wish to see and show the genital, and suppressed wishes to masturbate. In each of these the little girl is at a real disadvantage, but Horney argued that this does not make her feel primarily inferior. The driving force lay elsewhere. The girl first passes through an intense, feminine love for the father, in which the wish for a child from him is central. When that love is disappointed she gives up the father as an object and identifies with him instead. Horney saw this identification as one core of the female castration complex. The fantasy of having been castrated by the father in the course of that love was the other. Her conclusion was that it is "die verletzte Weiblichkeit", wounded femininity, that creates the castration complex. In this the woman's failure at the Oedipus complex parallels the man's.

In The Flight from Womanhood⁶ (1926) she widened the argument. Drawing on the philosopher Georg Simmel, she wrote that "our whole culture is a masculine culture", whose standards of what is objective are in practice male. She found that the analytic picture of female development closely matched the ideas little boys hold about girls. She read Sándor Ferenczi's genital theory as an instance of the male view of motherhood. Against that view she set the physiological superiority motherhood gives women, and the boy's intense envy of pregnancy, childbirth, the breast and nursing. She called it Mutterschaftsneid, the idea later known as womb envy. She suggested that theories devaluing motherhood might serve an unconscious male tendency, and that men's creative work draws on the drive this envy gives them.

The girl's masculinity complex appeared in the paper as a secondary flight from femininity, driven by guilt and anxiety over Oedipal wishes. Horney held that this flight is reinforced by women's actual disadvantage in social life, and allowed for an interaction between psychic and social factors. Ernest Jones opened The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁷ (1927) by endorsing her charge that analytic views of early female development were distorted by bias. In the same paper he distinguished, as Horney and Helene Deutsch had done, between a pre-Oedipal and a post-Oedipal penis envy.

Horney's papers on female psychology appeared between 1923 and 1935, and New Ways in Psychoanalysis¹ gave the subject a chapter. The papers were collected after her death as Feminine Psychology (1967).

The Neurotic Personality of Our Time⁴ described a character structure common to the neurotics of her day. Its premise was that neuroses are generated not only by incidental individual experiences but also by specific cultural conditions. Horney placed anxiety at the centre and named its root basic anxiety, "an insidiously increasing, all-pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile world". This anxiety is bound up with hostility.

Against it, she argued, people in her culture seek protection in four main ways: affection, submissiveness, power and withdrawal. What drives these needs is a need for reassurance, not a wish for pleasure. Successive chapters treat the neurotic need for affection, the quest for power, prestige and possession, neurotic competitiveness, guilt feelings and masochism. The book closes by tracing the typical neurotic conflicts to contradictions within the culture itself. The difference between the neurotic and the normal person, she held, is merely quantitative. She still wrote that her interpretation rested fundamentally on Freudian ground, and warned that strict adherence to Freud's theories risked stagnation.

New Ways in Psychoanalysis¹ set out what she kept and what she rejected. She kept what she called Freud's fundamental findings: the strict determination of psychic processes, unconscious motivation and the resistance bound up with it, repression and the other defences, the formative power of early experience, transference and free association. She called transference the most powerful tool of therapy. She rejected the instinct theory and the mechanistic, evolutionist premises behind it, arguing that "psychoanalysis should outgrow the limitations set by its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology".

She judged the theory of libido unsubstantiated and denied the Oedipus complex a biological basis. She redescribed narcissism as self-inflation, itself a neurotic trend. Further chapters examine the death instinct, the ego and the id, the super-ego, guilt and masochism. She said that she meant not to found a new school but to free psychoanalysis of these limits.

In place of the drives she set the neurotic trends: strivings, such as the need for affection or for perfection, by which a person who feels helpless in a menacing world gains some measure of safety. Man, she wrote, is ruled by two guiding principles, safety and satisfaction. Anxiety arises when a safety device on which a person depends is endangered. The aim of therapy, accordingly, is to restore the person to themself: to bring the patient to a point where the safety devices are no longer needed, and so to recover spontaneity and a centre of gravity within. Among her debts she named Fromm, for showing the central significance that the loss of self has for neurosis, together with Wilhelm Reich, Harald Schultz-Hencke and Max Horkheimer.

In Self-Analysis (1942) Horney listed ten neurotic trends. Our Inner Conflicts⁸ (1945) regrouped them into three basic attitudes toward others: moving toward people, moving against them and moving away from them. Each overstresses one element of basic anxiety: helplessness, hostility or isolation. Their clash, which she called the basic conflict, is the dynamic centre of neurosis. In the introduction she wrote that neuroses are generated by disturbances in human relationships, and that the libido theory was no longer tenable for her. Freud, she wrote, had seen neurotic conflict as a battle between repressed and repressing forces, universal and in principle beyond resolution. She located it between contradictory neurotic trends, held that it need not arise, and held that when it does arise it can be resolved.

The book then examines the attempts at solution. One attitude may be suppressed in favour of another, or the person may withdraw into detachment. The most important of these attempts is the idealized image, in which the conflicting trends are transfigured until they appear not as conflicts but as aspects of a rich personality. Another is externalization, the tendency to experience inner processes as if they occurred outside oneself. Horney considered externalization wider than projection and called it an active process of self-elimination. Each attempt breeds new conflict. She called the theory constructive nonetheless: neurotic conflicts, she wrote, cannot be resolved by rational decision, but they can be resolved by changing the inner conditions that produced them. She also stated a belief that a person "can change and go on changing as long as he lives".

Neurosis and Human Growth⁹ (1950), her last and fullest statement, rests on the opposition between the real self and an idealized self. Under adverse conditions the person abandons the first for the second and embarks on a search for glory. Neurotic claims, the tyranny of the should, neurotic pride and self-hate follow, and with them alienation from the self. The book describes expansive, self-effacing and resigned solutions, which correspond to moving against, toward and away from people. It frames therapy as freeing the forces of self-realization.

Bernard Paris, of the International Karen Horney Society, divides the expansive solution into narcissistic, perfectionistic and arrogant-vindictive types. He also stresses that the pride system intensifies the self-hate it is meant to ward off.

Horney's critique of the theory of femininity found an early ally in Ernest Jones (The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁷). Her American work placed her in the cultural school, alongside Fromm, Sullivan, Thompson and Abram Kardiner. Through Sullivan and Thompson that circle was linked to interpersonal psychoanalysis.

According to Bernard Paris, her influence faded after her death and revived with the publication of Feminine Psychology in 1967. Since then she has been called the first great psychoanalytic feminist. Paris reports that Abraham Maslow counted her among the founders of humanistic psychology. He compares her real self with Donald Winnicott's true self and Heinz Kohut's nuclear self, while noting that, unlike the self psychologists, she saw narcissism as reactive rather than primary.

Her focus on the present rather than on childhood has led some analysts to complain that her explanations lack depth; to others it is the source of her originality. Many of her ideas, Paris argues, entered clinical practice without acknowledgement. The main biographies are Jack Rubins's Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis (1978), Susan Quinn's A Mind of Her Own² (1987) and Paris's Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self-Understanding (1994).

Her papers on female psychology begin with On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women⁵ (1923) and The Flight from Womanhood⁶ (1926). They were collected in Feminine Psychology (1967).

Her books are The Neurotic Personality of Our Time⁴ (1937), New Ways in Psychoanalysis¹ (1939), Self-Analysis (1942), Our Inner Conflicts⁸ (1945) and Neurosis and Human Growth⁹ (1950). Writings published after her death include The Adolescent Diaries of Karen Horney (1980), Final Lectures (1991), and two volumes edited by Bernard Paris: The Therapeutic Process (1999) and The Unknown Karen Horney (2000).