Feminine Psychology

1922

Karen Horney (1885–1952)

Karen Danielsen Horney experienced significant personal and professional setbacks in life, yet she offered important insights into how we can deal with our anxieties. Her work on psychology from a feminine perspective was among the first to challenge Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the inadequacy of women’s psychological development. She published a series of articles on female psychology from 1922 to 1937; these papers were later collected and published as Feminine Psychology in 1967.

Horney grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in a home whose dynamics shaped her career. Both parents favored her brother, who was abusive toward Karen. She was not encouraged to pursue her dream to become a physician. After medical school, Karen trained as a psychoanalyst and worked in Berlin until 1932, when she moved to Chicago. Two years later, she moved to New York, where she founded her own institute and journal.

Early in her professional practice she grew dissatisfied with some aspects of Freudian theory, particularly Freud’s contention that it was impossible for women to experience full psychological development, which led them to envy male development as symbolized by the penis. She argued that what hindered women psychologically was not some fundamental flaw in their physical makeup but the social constraints placed on them. Because of these constraints, both healthy and neurotic women tended to overvalue love because of their economic and social dependence on men.

The themes of intimate and familial relationships continued to figure prominently in Horney’s writing. She wrote that in many families, children develop a basic anxiety because they feel unsafe, unvalued, and unloved. In response they try to reduce anxiety by developing ways to defend themselves either through love, power, or detachment. Healthy adults demonstrate a flexible use of these three strategies, but too often, one or more of the strategies becomes exaggerated. Those who exaggerate love may become compliant, seeking to counter anxiety by pursuing approval and making themselves overly dependent on others. This, Horney argued, was especially problematic for women and hindered their psychological development.

SEE ALSO Psychoanalysis (1899), Cultural Relativism (1928), Humanistic Psychology (1961)

An image of Karen Horney from the American Journal of Psychotherapy, Volume 5, 1951.

In this 1901 illustration from Danish magazine The Raven, the lawyer says to his psychologically hindered spouse, “Rejoice, little wife, now you get the new hat that you have so long wished for—and a fur coat, you also get!”