Karen Horney Essay

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Karen Horney (1885-1952) Karen Horney was born Karen Danielson on September 16, 1885 near Hamburg, Germany (Muskingum, 1999). Her parents were Clotilde and Berndt Danielson. Her father was a Norwegian Sea captain, a widower with four teenaged children of his own. Karen's mother was a woman of Dutch-German noble extraction (O'Connell & Russo, 1990). Her mother, Clotilde, was considered to be more suave then her father, and was also 19 years younger than her father. Her parents also came from different social backgrounds. Her father was the son of a watchmaker, while her mother was the daughter of architect. Horney’s stepmother Clotilde and her father had already had one child together, Berndt. Karen was the youngest of two, her brother Berndt was older and he was her father’s favorite. Horney became really close to her stepmother because she was deprived from her father’s affection. At age nine, Horney had something of a crush on her brother and he turned her away. This led to Horney’s depression which affected her for the rest of her life. In 1904 Horney’s mother divorced her father and left him with Karen and young Berndt. She began Medical school in 1906 where she met her husband Oscar Horney and married him in 1909. Just before her mother passed away, she had the first of three daughters in 1910. In 1911 her stepmother Sonni died and this brought more depression into her life. After her mother passed away she decided to study psychoanalysis. In 1913 she received her MD from the University of Berlin and she taught in Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (1918-1932). Horney had also given birth to her second child. In 1915 Karen gave birth to her third child. In 1923 Horney’s husband got sick and that caused for his business to shut down. In the same year Horney’s brother died of a pulmonary infection. At that time Horney became so depressed that she was starting

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