Book
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.
Main ideas
- Horney's own diaries and letters are the main sources, giving an intimate account of her inner life alongside her career.
- Her formation in Berlin psychoanalysis, including her analyses with Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, shaped the analyst she became.
- Horney is portrayed as an independent thinker who challenged Freud's account of femininity and female development from within the movement.
- Her 1941 exclusion from the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is treated as a defining episode in the politics of American psychoanalysis and a loss to both sides.
- The group Horney founded after the break suffered its own schisms, among them Erich Fromm's departure, and grew authoritarian in turn.
What it shows
- 1910
Karl Abraham analysed Karen Horney
Horney began analysis with Abraham in Berlin in 1910, while still a medical student and young wife.
- 1920
Hanns Sachs analysed Karen Horney
Horney's second analysis, with Sachs, came around 1920, when he had just begun training analyses at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.
- 1943
Erich Fromm broke with Karen Horney
In 1943 Fromm left Horney's Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis after his training privileges were withdrawn because he was not a physician; Harry Stack Sullivan and Clara Thompson left with him.
Gallery
Cover of Susan Quinn's A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney, Addison-Wesley paperback, Radcliffe Biography Series, 1988