Horney, Karen (1885–1952)

US psychiatrist and psychoanalyst born in Germany. During the 1920s she began to publish a series of papers that took issue with some of the major tenets of orthodox Freudianism and she continued her often lonely fight, in particular to have women's distinctive psychosexual issues considered. During the 1930s she developed theories about the importance of sociocultural factors in human development, as opposed to purely intrapsychic ones, theories since incorporated into contemporary psychology. In 1934 she moved to New York City, where she built up a private practice while teaching at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the New School for Social Research. In 1941, with other prominent psychoanalysts, she founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, which also established its own training institute and professional journal, the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, of which she served as an editor 1941–55. Her published work includes Our Inner Conflicts 1945 and Neurosis and Human Growth 1950.

Born near Hamburg, she was raised by a strict Norwegian father and a more liberal Dutch mother. She lived out tensions in her youth that would provide many of the themes of her later work. While a medical student in Germany, she married a fellow student in 1909 and they had three children. Her personal and emotional life was already under great strain by 1915 and she underwent Freudian analysis with Karl Abraham. She began to take on patients for analysis in 1919 and was affiliated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic and Institute until 1932, when she was invited to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. A difficult woman to get close to – usually reserved but occasionally insensitive to others – she remained at the centre of the storm in New York and international psychoanalytical circles, but in the years following her death she has been recognized as a major figure in the psychoanalytical movement.