his sarcastic, sometimes biting, comments. He seemed to hold everyone he
encountered with contempt. I never heard him say a nice thing about anyone.
Today he is a cutthroat —albeit successful —businessman. The third example is
a woman who works in a small office tabulating figures. She rarely socializeswith the other employees, so now most of them have stopped asking her tojoin them. She has few friends and spends most of her evenings by herself.
According to Horney, what these three people have in common is that
each is desperately fighting off feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. Al-though they eventually drive people away with their behavior, on the inside
they are scared and pitiful individuals. Horney would have identified all three
of these people as neurotic . The key characteristic of neurotics in her theory is
that they are trapped in a self-defeating interpersonal style. That is, the way
these people interact with others prevents them from developing the social con-
tact they unconsciously crave. Ironically, their destructive interpersonal style
is a type of defense mechanism intended to ward off their feelings of anxiety.
What is it in the backgrounds of these people that brought them to the
sad situations they find themselves in today? Freud explained neurosis in
terms of fixated energy and unconscious battles between various aspects of
Karen Horney
1885 –1952
Karen Danielsen was born in
Hamburg, Germany, thedaughter of a sea captainand his young, second wife.From her earliest years on,
she faced the injustices andrejection that came frombeing a rebellious woman in
a man ’s world. Her father was a strict authoritarian
who used Bible verse to promote his views on thesuperiority of men. Karen ’s older brother, Berndt, was
awarded opportunities, including college and aneventual law degree that her father believedunnecessary for a female. Karen responded to these
inequities by vowing in elementary school to always befirst in her class, and at age 12 decided she would oneday go to medical school.
Karen ’s mother persuaded her father to allow
Karen to go to college, where she met and marriedOskar Horney in 1909. In 1915 she received hermedical degree from the University of Berlin, one of thefew female students in one of the few schools to acceptwomen. She underwent psychoanalysis as part of herpsychoanalytic training but found it insufficient fordealing with her lifelong bouts with depression. At one
point her husband was reported to have rescued herfrom a suicide attempt (Rubins, 1978). Despite herdepression, her doubts about psychoanalysis, and anumber of personal problems —including the
premature death of her brother, a strained marriage,
and eventual divorce —her career prospered. She
worked at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and laterimmigrated to America, where she joined the NewYork Psychoanalytic Institute in 1934.
However, it was not in Horney ’s character to
check her growing dissatisfaction with several aspectsof Freud ’s theory. This open questioning created
great strain with the other members of the institute,who in 1941 voted to disqualify her as an instructor.According to most reports, Horney received the vote in
a dramatically silent room. She responded by leavingthe meeting in a dignified and proud manner,
without uttering a word. Horney went on to establish
her own highly successful American Institute forPsychoanalysis. By the time of her death, in 1952, itwas clear she had made great progress in her battleagainst the male-dominated and paternalisticpsychoanalytic school of thought.Bettmann/CORBIS112 CHAPTER 5 The Psychoanalyt ic Approach