Karen Horney Essay

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Karen Horney was born in Blankenese, a German city outside of Hamburg, on September 16, 1885. As a young child Horney felt ignored by her father and she began to battle depression as earlier as the age of nine. She decided at a young age to concentrate her attention on developing her intellectual and academic skills. She used her academic abilities to compensate for the fact she felt she was an unattractive girl. When Karen was 21, and against her parents wishes, she enrolled in the University of Freiburg Medical School in Germany. She transferred from there to the University of Gottingen and ultimately graduated from the University of Berlin in 1913. Horney met her husband, Oskar Horney, while she was in medical school. The two had three daughters together but that did not prevent Horney from continuing her career in psychoanalysis. Often dealing with difficult times Horney turned to Freudian analysis to help her resolve some of her issues. In 1915 she followed Freudian analysis with Karl Abraham who was a student as well as college of Freud and then stated taking on patients of her own. Horney began working with the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Berlin in 1920. She lectured regularly while there and within a few years, she entered into another depression after the decline of her husband’s health and the death of her mother and then only brother. After suffering through a prolonged depressive and suicidal state, Horney left her abusive husband in 1926 and eventually moved to the United States with her children in 1930. Horney ended up in Brooklyn, which was home to a large Jewish German population. There she met Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm who were also prominent pioneers in the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Once in the United States, Horney took a position as the Associate Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. It was during this
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