Karen Horney
German-born physician and psychoanalyst
German-born physician and psychoanalyst who criticised Freud's account of women, argued that neurosis arises from social and cultural conditions, and wrote The Neurotic Personality of Our Time in 1937.
Why this person matters
Horney challenged Freud's idea of penis envy with a social explanation and proposed that men may envy women's capacity to bear children. Her later theory of neurotic trends influenced personality and clinical teaching.
Main contributions
Critique of Freud on women
In a 1924 paper she argued that penis envy, where it occurs, reflects the status and recognition culture gives men rather than a wish for a penis. She also proposed that 'womb envy' occurs in men as much as penis envy in women.
Neurosis and culture
In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) she placed neurosis in social conditions. She grouped neurotic needs into three trends (moving toward, against and away from people) and described the 'tyranny of the shoulds', the neurotic's rigid demands on the self.
Institutions
She helped design and eventually direct the training programme of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she worked from 1918 to 1932. After resigning from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941 she co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Context and limits
Her theory of neurotic trends is clinical description rather than a tested hypothesis, and the sources read report no experimental tests. She is often classed as neo-Freudian, though one scholar sees her as neo-Adlerian. Janet Sayers argued that she was too individualist for collective political struggle. Reference sources disagree on the year of her medical degree (1911 or 1913).
In your introductory course
Personality.Appears in the personality chapter as a psychoanalytic theorist who stressed social factors, and in gender psychology for her early critique of Freud.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 11.3. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1924
Published her paper on the genesis of the castration complex in women.
- 1932
Moved to the United States to be Franz Alexander's assistant at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis.
- 1937
Published The Neurotic Personality of Our Time.
- 1941
Resigned from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute after controversy over her critiques of Freud and co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.
- 1950
Published Neurosis and Human Growth.
Sources
- Psychology's Feminist Voices, Karen HorneySociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Karen HorneyReference work. Reference article inspected.