Karen Horney: Career and works

Horney took up a position within the Institute for in Berlin, where she lectured on for several years. Karl Abraham, a correspondent of , regarded as an extensively gifted analyst and teacher of .

By 1923, Oskar Horney’s firm had become insolvent, with Oskar developing meningitis soon thereafter. Oskar rapidly became embittered, morose and argumentative. It was also in 1923 that Karen’s brother died of a pulmonary infection. Both these events contributed to a worsening of Karen’s mental health. She entered into a second state of abject depression; she swam out to sea during a vacation and considered committing suicide. In 1926, Karen and her three daughters moved out of Oskar’s house. Four years later, they immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Brooklyn. At the time, Brooklyn was home to a large intellectual community; this was due in part to a high influx of Jewish refugees from Europe, particularly Germany. It was in Brooklyn that Karen became friends with academics such as and Harry Stack Sullivan, at one point embarking on an with the former, which ended bitterly.

Horney quickly set about establishing herself. Her first career posting in the United States was as the Associate Director of the Chicago Institute for . It was while living in Brooklyn that Horney developed and advanced her composite theories regarding and personality, based on experiences gained from working in psychotherapy. In 1937 she published the book The of Our Time, which had wide popular readership. By 1941, Horney was Dean of the American Institute of , a training institute for those who were interested in Horney’s own organization, the Association for the Advancement of . Horney founded this organization after becoming dissatisfied with the generally strict, orthodox nature of the .

In the end, Horney’s deviation from Freudian psychology led to her resigning from her post, and she soon took up teaching in the New York Medical College. She also founded a journal, named the American Journal of . She taught at the New York Medical College and continued practicing as a psychiatrist until her death in 1952.

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May 29, 2008 | Filed Under Psychotherapists 

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