When was karen horney born

This made her ambitious and rebellious. She was attracted towards her brother who rebuffed her advances, sending her into first of her many bouts of depression. In , Karen married Oskar Horney and had three daughters. In , Karen started teaching at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin. In , Oskar suffered losses in his business. She opposed Freud's idea that penis envy and the rejection of femininity were the basic factors in woman's psychology, that her wishes for a child and for a man were merely a conversion of her unsatisfied wish for a penis.

Between and Horney, a person of remarkable aliveness and dedication, was at the peak of her creative life.

While practicing and teaching psycho-analysis, she wrote many articles and five books in which she presented the development of her psychoanalytic concepts. In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time Horney expressed the view that neuroses are generated by cultural disturbances and conflicts which the person has experienced in accentuated form mainly in childhood, in which he did not receive love, guidance, respect, and opportunities for growth. She described the neurotic character structure as a dynamic process with basic anxiety, defenses against anxiety, conflict, and solutions to conflict as its essential elements.

While continuing to adhere to the fundamental importance of unconscious forces, inner conflicts, free association, dreams, the analytic relationship, and neurotic defenses in psychoanalysis, she rejected Freud's concepts of the role of instincts in health and emotional illness. She saw aggression and sexual problems as the result of neurotic development rather than its cause.

In Self-analysis Horney indicated the possibilities, limitations, and specific ways in which people can change through increasing self-awareness. Their fear is of being thought nobodies, unimportant and meaningless. The neurotic need for personal achievement. Again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with achievement -- far from it!

But some people are obsessed with it. They have to be number one at everything they do. Since this is, of course, quite a difficult task, you will find these people devaluing anything they cannot be number one in! If they are good runners, then the discus and the hammer are "side shows.

The neurotic need for self-sufficiency and independence. We should all cultivate some autonomy, but some people feel that they shouldn't ever need anybody. They tend to refuse help and are often reluctant to commit to a relationship. The neurotic need for perfection and unassailability. To become better and better at life and our special interests is hardly neurotic, but some people are driven to be perfect and scared of being flawed.

They can't be caught making a mistake and need to be in control at all times. As Horney investigated these neurotic needs, she began to recognize that they can be clustered into three broad coping strategies :. Withdrawal , including needs nine, ten, and three. She added three here because it is crucial to the illusion of total independence and perfection that you limit the breadth of your life!

In her writings, she used a number of other phrases to refer to these three strategies. Besides compliance, she referred to the first as the moving-toward strategy and the self-effacing solution.

One should also note that it is the same as Adler's getting or leaning approach, or the phlegmatic personality. Besides aggression, the second was referred to as moving-against and the expansive solution. It is the same as Alder's ruling or dominant type, or the choleric personality. And, besides withdrawal, she called the third moving-away-from and the resigning solution.

It is somewhat like Adler's avoiding type, the melancholy personality. It is true that some people who are abused or neglected as children suffer from neuroses as adults. What we often forget is that most do not. If you have a violent father, or a schizophrenic mother, or are sexually molested by a strange uncle, you may nevertheless have other family members that love you, take care of you, and work to protect you from further injury, and you will grow up to be a healthy, happy adult.

It is even more true that the great majority of adult neurotics did not in fact suffer from childhood neglect or abuse! So the question becomes, if it is not neglect or abuse that causes neurosis, what does? Horney's answer, which she called the "basic evil," is parental indifference , a lack of warmth and affection in childhood.

Even occasional beatings or an early sexual experience can be overcome, if the child feels wanted and loved. The key to understanding parental indifference is that it is a matter of the child's perception, and not the parents' intentions. Please notice that many parents -- even good ones -- find themselves doing these things because of the many pressures they may be under.

Other parents do these things because they themselves are neurotic, and place their own needs ahead of their children's.

Horney noticed that, in contrast to our stereotypes of children as weak and passive, their first reaction to parental indifference is anger, a response she calls basic hostility. To be frustrated first leads to an effort at protesting the injustice! Some children find this hostility effective, and over time it becomes a habitual response to life's difficulties. In other words, they develop an aggressive coping strategy. They say to themselves, "If I have power, no one can hurt me. Was this page helpful?

Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Boeree CG. Karen Horney: Personality Theories ; Summit Books, Related Articles. Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theories of Women. Pictures of Famous Psychologists.

Biography of Psychologist Melanie Klein. Sigmund Freud's Theories and Legacy in Psychology. The History of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The 10 Needs of Neurotic People. Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis Study Guide.