Karen's Career
In 1906, Karen Horney, nee Danielsen, was accepted to the University of Freiberg to study medicine (which was among the first universities to take female applicants). During her time here she changed university twice, to the University of Gottingen, and graduated from university of Berlin (to study medicine this was expected). This was to be the start of a well-established career.
During her time in Berlin (she decided to narrow her field to psychoanalysis around the same time she married and her mother died. In 1913, Karen graduated from medical school, earning a doctorate and beginning her career in analysis, teaching at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Berlin.
Karen had left her husband in 1926, deciding to move to America where she lived in Brooklyn, after teaching occasionally in New York alongside psychologist Karl Abraham. She was soon understood to be an intelligent and gifted person in psychology and found her first position being in Chicago’s Institute of Psychoanalysis as an Associate Director.
It was during this period that Dr. Horney developed many of her theories, and books were published primarily in personality. The knowledge she used in the books was based on psychotherapy experience on patients, as opposed to Sigmund Freud, whom Karen agreed with much of his work but not all.
Dr. Horney was a feminist and disagreed with Freud’s theory of penis envy and anger (in relation to sex). Though she agreed with many of his works, she was very critical and open about this, she put opposing views around theories of womb envy, the theory men are frustrated/inferior, in relation to life, because men cannot reproduce, and they seek superiority in other areas of their life.
During 1941, Horney was made Dean. She thought psychoanalysis was too strict in the Freudian views, thus, she resigned and founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.
Up until Karens death in 1952, she practised psychiatry and taught in the New York Medical School while founding The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
