biography
| name: |
Horney, Karen
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née Danielsen
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1885–1952)
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| biography:
| Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born near Hamburg, Germany. 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 (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 herself began to take on patients for analysis (1919) and became affiliated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic and Institute until 1932, when she was invited to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Separated from her husband, feeling the Berlin psychoanalytic atmosphere too oppressive, and fearing the threat of Nazism, she went to Chicago. Meanwhile, during the 1920s she had already begun 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 but which at the time were considered heretical by many Freudians. After two years in Chicago (1932–4) 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. She soon fell out with the orthodox Freudians there, and with Clara Thompson, Erich Fromm, and other prominent psychoanalysts founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (1941), which also established its own training institute and professional journal, the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, of which she served as an editor (1941–55). These institutions became the base of her influence, in turn communicated by her magnetic lectures and such books as Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950). 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. |
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