Horney, Karen

As one of the second generation of psychoanalysts following Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Karen Horney (1885–1952) is acknowledged as the first feminist in the field of psychoanalysis. She was a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she actively trained and taught. But during her lifetime, very few of her early colleagues in Berlin or Vienna anticipated the profound paradigm shift in the theory of psychodynamic treatment she was about to create in the decades following her pivotal move to the United States in 1932.

Horney began her clinical practice in Berlin in 1910, and by 1924, she was writing extensively on the limitations of Freud’s instinct-driven theory of psychoanalysis, especially as applied to women. After her immigration to the United States, she made contact with ...