Karen Horney earned her medical degree in 1915,
after studying at the University of Frieberg, however she had prior knowledge
to psychoanalysis before her graduation. She took great issue with Freud and
his view on women, and between the years 1922 and 1935, published several
articles that deconstructed and redefined how men and women were portrayed in
psychoanalysis. With the rise of fascism in 1932, she fled Germany and settled
in the United States, more specifically in Chicago. However she eventually moved
to New York City, where she integrated herself in the intellectual community
that was already there. Horney wrote all five of her books while she lived in
the United States, with several other pieces of her works being published
posthumously as anthologies of her papers that had been published or
unpublished elsewhere. One of her books was called The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and was meant to be partially
autobiographical, and it entailed her struggles with love, alienation, and
spoke of a life in the 1930s, which she described as the “age of anxiety”. Her
feminist essays were published in 1967, which were brought to the forefront by
the burgeoning women’s movement, and she continues to provide a contrarian view
of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis.
Horney’s views were not just at the forefront
of the women’s movement because they contradicted Freud’s misogynistic ones. They also offered a feminist psychoanalytic
explanation for why men would deny and limit women’s opportunities. Horney introduced the idea of womb envy, a
reversal of the penis envy theory proposed by Freud. Freud’s theory suggested that women were born
believing that they used to have male genitalia, and that the castration of
those male genitalia led them to suffer from penis envy and develop a jealousy
of men. Horney offered an opposite
theory. She posited that males
unconsciously felt inferior to women and wanted to maintain their illusions of
superiority over women and did so by ostracizing women. In 1939 she published New Ways in Psychoanalysis, which detailed all her theories, one
of the most important of which challenged Freud’s belief that women were born
neurotic.
Besides challenging Freud’s theories on
feminist issues, Horney also disagreed with him on theories of anxiety. Instead of posing the idea that anxiety came
from too many demands being put on the ego, Horney theorized that it came from consistent
feelings of loneliness or helplessness.
She described this as basic anxiety.
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| The Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace |
Timeline: 1939--Karen Horney's book New Ways in Psychoanalysis is published
References
Benjamin, L. (2014). The Early Schools of American Psychology. In A Brief History of Modern Psychology (2nd ed., pp. 136-138). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
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