A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney

Susan Quinn's biography of Karen Horney (1885–1952), the first book by the journalist, draws on Horney's diaries and letters to follow her from her youth in Hamburg through her medical studies, among the first women admitted to medicine in Germany, and her analyses with Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs. It describes her work at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she became one of the first physicians trained in psychoanalysis and took issue with Freud's views on female development. The book then traces her emigration to the United States in 1932, first to Chicago and then New York, her rise as a leading figure of American psychoanalysis, and her exclusion from the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1941. Its later chapters turn to the association she founded and the splits within it, including Erich Fromm's departure, showing how the dissident group came to reproduce the autocracy it had fled. Reviewers praised it as balanced and candid, and it received the Boston Globe's Laurence L. Winship Award.