HORNEY, Karen (1885-1952), German-American psychiatrist, born in
Hamburg, and educated at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin. She was an instructor at
the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Berlin from 1920 to 1932, when she immigrated to the
U.S. After serving as associate director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis for
two years, she taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from 1934 to 1941. She
became dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, which she helped to found, in
1941 and a professor at New York Medical College in 1942. Horney founded a neo-Freudian
school of psychoanalysis based on the conclusion that neuroses are the result of emotional
conflicts arising from childhood experiences and later disturbances in interpersonal
relationships. Horney believed that such disturbances are conditioned to a large extent by
the society in which an individual lives rather than solely by the instinctual drives
postulated by Freud. Among her writings are The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
(1936), New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), Self-Analysis (1942), Our
Inner Conflicts (1945), and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950).
Analysts and therapists