40 Fun Facts About Karen Horney

Which object did Karen Horney's strict father hurl so often that his children nicknamed him for it?

A Bible was his missile of choice, so the children called Berndt Danielsen 'the Bible-thrower'. A Protestant traditionalist, he still brought his daughter gifts from far-away countries.

Karen Horney wanted to win so badly at which pastime that friends sometimes caught her cheating?

Card games brought out her fiercest competitive streak. When caught cheating she would laugh, freely admit it, and say her opponents should have stopped her sooner.

Historian Robert C. Tucker used Karen Horney's theory of neurosis to explain which Soviet leader?

Joseph Stalin, Tucker argued, was a neurotic of exactly the kind she described. The idea came to him while he was serving on the staff of the American embassy in Moscow.

Bill W., who said Karen Horney's insights had helped him, co-founded which worldwide fellowship?

Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W. wrote of his admiration for her in a letter that went on to imagine a 'Neurotics Anonymous', a fellowship that was founded some years later.

Which idea did Karen Horney introduce to turn Freud's theory about women back on men?

Womb envy, she argued, drives men to claim superiority in other fields because they cannot create and sustain life.

Late in life Karen Horney toured Japan with D. T. Suzuki to explore which spiritual tradition?

Zen Buddhism absorbed her in her final years. On the trip she visited temples and held long discussions with monks, trying to fit their teaching to her own ideas.

At the age of nine, Karen Horney resolved that if she could not be pretty she would instead be what?

Smart was her choice, a vow prompted by her father's unflattering remarks about her looks. Within a few years she had made up her mind to become a doctor.

Karen Horney's eldest daughter, Brigitte, became a star in 1930s Germany in which profession?

Film actress Brigitte Horney is best remembered for playing Catherine the Great in Münchhausen. After the Second World War she took American citizenship.

Karen Horney's devout father took his family around Cape Horn because he worked in which profession?

Ship's captain Berndt Danielsen sailed with his family along South America's west coast and as far north as San Diego. The trips gave his daughter a lifelong love of travel.

Karen Horney likened healthy personal development to which seed growing into a tree in fertile soil?

An acorn needs only good ground to become what it was meant to be, and she believed people unfold the same way unless their spontaneity is crushed early in life.

Karen Horney was born in Blankenese, now a riverside suburb of which German port city?

Hamburg did not take in Blankenese until the 1930s. When she was born there in 1885 it was a separate community in Holstein with a long history as a fishing village on the Elbe.

Karen Horney left Germany in 1932 to help run a new psychoanalytic institute in which American city?

Chicago kept her for only two years. She clashed with the institute's director, Franz Alexander, over how much of Freud's theory to discard, and left for New York in 1934.

In 1920 Karen Horney began teaching at a new psychoanalytic institute in which European capital?

Berlin was where she practised and taught until 1932. She helped to design the training programme for new analysts there and eventually directed it.

Karen Horney recast which Freudian idea as the product of a troubled parent-child bond, not desire?

The Oedipus complex, in her version, has nothing erotic about it: a child clings to one parent and resents the other simply because a disturbed relationship has left it fearful.

Karen Horney is credited with founding which field with papers challenging Freud in the 1920s?

Feminist psychology grew from her view that differences between men and women come from society and culture, not biology. She dropped the subject in the mid-1930s and never returned to it.

Karen Horney's interest in culture was fed by her friendship with which author of Coming of Age in Samoa?

Margaret Mead was one of several anthropologists whose company sharpened her belief that culture shapes personality, a belief her move to the United States reinforced.

What did Karen Horney begin keeping at thirteen that was finally published in 1980?

A diary begun at thirteen records her confident plans for the future, among them becoming a doctor at a time when German women could not attend university.

Which illness, undiagnosed because she avoided her doctor, killed Karen Horney in New York in 1952?

Cancer went undetected until late 1952 because she would not consult her physician about her pains. She died that December, surrounded by her daughters.

Karen Horney's father, a naturalised German, had been born a citizen of which other country?

Norway was Berndt Danielsen's homeland, though he had taken German citizenship. Her mother, Clotilde van Ronzelen, came from a family of Dutch origin.

Which condition first struck Karen Horney at the age of nine and returned throughout her life?

Depression shadowed her from childhood. A second severe episode came in 1923, the year her husband's firm became insolvent and her brother died of a lung infection.

Which term did Karen Horney use for a child's feeling of being alone in a threatening world?

Basic anxiety was, for her, the soil in which neurosis grows: the strategies a child adopts to cope with it can harden into persistent, irrational needs.

Which phrase did Karen Horney use for a neurotic's relentless inner demands to match an ideal self?

The tyranny of the shoulds leaves the neurotic swinging like a pendulum between imagined perfection and self-hate. Her work later influenced Albert Ellis's rational emotive therapy.

Karen Horney's 'moving toward people' strategy, built on a need for affection, goes by which name?

Compliance is the self-effacing solution, chosen by a child who decides that winning love is the surest protection against being hurt.

Which 1950 book, published two years before Karen Horney died, is regarded as her magnum opus?

Neurosis and Human Growth sets out her mature theory: thirteen chapters trace how a neurotic personality develops, one covers therapy and one compares her ideas with classical theory.

Which thinker had a romance with Karen Horney and later trained her daughter Marianne as an analyst?

Erich Fromm and she shaped each other's thinking, he explaining sociology to her and she psychoanalysis to him, before their affair ended bitterly.

As a girl, Karen Horney played at being Chief Winnetou, a hero created by which German adventure novelist?

Karl May is one of the best-selling German writers of all time, and his Apache hero was the part she usually took in childhood make-believe.

Which founder of person-centred therapy named Karen Horney among the roots of his approach?

Carl Rogers launched his approach in 1940 and traced it to the neo-Freudian analysts, her above all. A decade later he said it had taken a different path from hers.

Karen Horney's stress on social forces is often likened to which founder of individual psychology?

Alfred Adler reached such similar conclusions that she is sometimes labelled neo-Adlerian, yet scholars have found no direct evidence that either influenced the other.

Karen Horney began medical school in 1906 at which German university, among the first to admit women?

Freiburg had only recently opened its medical courses to women, and her mother came along to help her settle in. She later moved on to Göttingen to continue her studies.

Karen Horney used which term for the unfolding of a person's potential, the opposite of neurosis?

Self-realization happens, she said, when people act spontaneously on their full range of feelings. Neurosis follows when fear makes their actions compulsive instead.

Unlike Freud, Karen Horney saw which personality pattern as a product of childhood indulgence?

Narcissism, she argued, is not inborn: it arises when a certain temperament meets an indulgent early environment, and its self-esteem is weak because it rests on no real accomplishments.

In Karen Horney's theory, a neurotic who falls short of an impossible ideal identifies with which image?

The despised self is what the neurotic comes to mistake for the true one, after failing to become the flawless person they feel they ought to be.

Karen Horney kept which Aldous Huxley book on Eastern and Western mystics at her bedside for over a year?

The Perennial Philosophy, published in 1945, became her daily reading as she developed strong spiritual interests towards the end of her life.

Which illness struck Karen Horney's husband Oskar soon after his firm failed, leaving him embittered?

Meningitis left Oskar Horney morose and argumentative, and the marriage never recovered. In 1926 his wife and their three daughters moved out of his house.

Which close associate of Freud analysed Karen Horney and then mentored her as a young analyst in Germany?

Karl Abraham was her first analyst. He later gave her a post as an instructor and brought her to Freud's attention with high praise.

Which pioneer of child analysis treated Karen Horney's daughter Marianne when the girl was ten?

Melanie Klein was a friend of Marianne's mother from the same psychoanalytic circle. Marianne grew up to be an analyst herself and kept a practice into her nineties.

Which publisher brought out Karen Horney's books in her lifetime after meeting her through the New School's president?

W. W. Norton was introduced to her by Alvin Johnson, who ran the New School while she was teaching there, and his house brought out her first book in 1937.

Which term did Karen Horney give the bond between a self-effacing person and an arrogant partner?

Morbid dependency was her label for a relationship bordering on sadomasochism, an early account of what is now called co-dependency.

Which psychiatrist, famed for his interpersonal theory, befriended Karen Horney but quit her association?

Harry Stack Sullivan resigned along with Clara Thompson when the association declined to recognise an analyst who had no medical degree.

Which German-born theologian, an old friend, gave sermons that Karen Horney attended in New York?

Paul Tillich, the existential theologian, drew her to his sermons late in her life, though she cared more for the ethical and philosophical side of religion than for the spiritual one.