Karen Horney
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40 free Karen Horney trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Karen Horney was one of the first women trained as a psychoanalyst, and one of the first analysts of either sex to tell Sigmund Freud he was wrong about women. She went on to build her own account of why people become fearful, driven and divided against themselves, and she wrote about it in books that ordinary readers could follow. This quiz collects the fun facts and the big ideas together. Expect questions on her unusual childhood, her medical training at a time when German universities had barely opened to women, her move to America, her quarrels with fellow analysts and the terms she coined, plus a few surprises about her hobbies, her family and her famous admirers. It suits psychology students revising personality theory, teachers who want a ready-made review, and anyone curious about the woman behind the textbook name. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which object did Karen Horney's strict father hurl so often that his children nicknamed him for it?
A Bible
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.
Q 02Karen Horney wanted to win so badly at which pastime that friends sometimes caught her cheating?
Card games
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.
Q 03Historian Robert C. Tucker used Karen Horney's theory of neurosis to explain which Soviet leader?
Joseph Stalin
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.
Q 04Bill W., who said Karen Horney's insights had helped him, co-founded which worldwide fellowship?
Alcoholics Anonymous
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.
Q 05Which idea did Karen Horney introduce to turn Freud's theory about women back on men?
Womb envy
Womb envy, she argued, drives men to claim superiority in other fields because they cannot create and sustain life.
Q 06Late in life Karen Horney toured Japan with D. T. Suzuki to explore which spiritual tradition?
Zen Buddhism
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.
Q 07At the age of nine, Karen Horney resolved that if she could not be pretty she would instead be what?
Smart
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.
Q 08Karen Horney's eldest daughter, Brigitte, became a star in 1930s Germany in which profession?
Film actress
Film actress Brigitte Horney is best remembered for playing Catherine the Great in Münchhausen. After the Second World War she took American citizenship.
Q 09Karen Horney's devout father took his family around Cape Horn because he worked in which profession?
Ship's captain
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.
Q 10Karen Horney likened healthy personal development to which seed growing into a tree in fertile soil?
An acorn
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.
Q 11Karen Horney was born in Blankenese, now a riverside suburb of which German port city?
Hamburg
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.
Q 12Karen Horney left Germany in 1932 to help run a new psychoanalytic institute in which American city?
Chicago
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.
Q 13In 1920 Karen Horney began teaching at a new psychoanalytic institute in which European capital?
Berlin
Berlin was where she practised and taught until 1932. She helped to design the training programme for new analysts there and eventually directed it.
Q 21Which term did Karen Horney use for a child's feeling of being alone in a threatening world?
Basic anxiety
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.
Q 22Which phrase did Karen Horney use for a neurotic's relentless inner demands to match an ideal self?
The tyranny of the shoulds
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.
Q 23Karen Horney's 'moving toward people' strategy, built on a need for affection, goes by which name?
Compliance
Q 14Karen Horney recast which Freudian idea as the product of a troubled parent-child bond, not desire?
The Oedipus complex
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.
Q 15Karen Horney is credited with founding which field with papers challenging Freud in the 1920s?
Feminist psychology
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.
Q 16Karen Horney's interest in culture was fed by her friendship with which author of Coming of Age in Samoa?
Margaret Mead
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.
Q 17What did Karen Horney begin keeping at thirteen that was finally published in 1980?
A diary
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.
Q 18Which illness, undiagnosed because she avoided her doctor, killed Karen Horney in New York in 1952?
Cancer
Cancer went undetected until late 1952 because she would not consult her physician about her pains. She died that December, surrounded by her daughters.
Q 19Karen Horney's father, a naturalised German, had been born a citizen of which other country?
Norway
Norway was Berndt Danielsen's homeland, though he had taken German citizenship. Her mother, Clotilde van Ronzelen, came from a family of Dutch origin.
Q 20Which condition first struck Karen Horney at the age of nine and returned throughout her life?
Depression
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.
Compliance is the self-effacing solution, chosen by a child who decides that winning love is the surest protection against being hurt.
Q 24Which 1950 book, published two years before Karen Horney died, is regarded as her magnum opus?
Neurosis and Human Growth
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.
Q 25Which thinker had a romance with Karen Horney and later trained her daughter Marianne as an analyst?
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm and she shaped each other's thinking, he explaining sociology to her and she psychoanalysis to him, before their affair ended bitterly.
Q 26As a girl, Karen Horney played at being Chief Winnetou, a hero created by which German adventure novelist?
Karl May
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.
Q 27Which founder of person-centred therapy named Karen Horney among the roots of his approach?
Carl Rogers
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.
Q 28Karen Horney's stress on social forces is often likened to which founder of individual psychology?
Alfred Adler
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.
Q 29Karen Horney began medical school in 1906 at which German university, among the first to admit women?
Freiburg
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.
Q 30Karen Horney used which term for the unfolding of a person's potential, the opposite of neurosis?
Self-realization
Self-realization happens, she said, when people act spontaneously on their full range of feelings. Neurosis follows when fear makes their actions compulsive instead.