Hello Cgarnett2284, Karen Horney was born September 16, 1885, to Clotilde and Berndt
Wackels
Danielson. Her father was a ship's captain, a religious man, and an
authoritarian.
His children called him "the Bible thrower," because, according to
Horney,
he did! Her mother, who was known as Sonni, was a very different person
-- Berndt's second wife, 19 years his junior, and considerably more
urbane.
Karen also had an older brother, also named Berndt, for whom she cared
deeply, as well as four older siblings from her father's previous
marriage.
Karen Horney's childhood seems to have been one of misperceptions:
For
example, while she paints a picture of her father as a harsh
disciplinarian
who preferred her brother Berndt over her, he apparently
brought her gifts from all over the world and even took her on three
long
sea voyages with him -- a very unusual thing for sea captains to do in
those days! Nevertheless, she felt deprived of her father's affections,
and so became especially attached to her mother, becoming, as she put
it,
"her little lamb."
At the age of nine, she changed her approach to life, and became
ambitious
and even rebellious. She said "If I couldn't be pretty, I decided I
would
be smart," which is only unusual in that she actually was pretty! Also
during this time, she developed something of a crush on her own
brother.
Embarrassed by her attentions, as you might expect of a young teenage
boy,
he pushed her away. This led to her first bout with depression -- a
problem
that would plague her the rest of her life.
In early adulthood came several years of stress. In 1904, her mother
divorced her father and left him with Karen and young Berndt. In 1906,
she entered medical school, against her parents' wishes and, in fact,
against
the opinions of polite society of the time. While there, she met a law
student named Oscar Horney, whom she married in 1909. In 1910, Karen
gave
birth to Brigitte, the first of her three daughters. In 1911, her
mother
Sonni died. The strain of these events were hard on Karen, and she
entered
psychoanalysis.
As Freud might have predicted, she had married a man not unlike her
father: Oscar was an authoritarian as harsh with his children as the
captain
had been with his. Horney notes that she did not intervene, but rather
considered the atmosphere good for her children and encouraging their
independence.
Only many years later did hindsight change her perspective on
childrearing.
In 1923, Oskar's business collapsed and he developed meningitis. He
became a broken man, morose and argumentative. Also in 1923, Karen's
brother
died at the age of 40 of a pulmonary infection. Karen became very
depressed,
to the point of swimming out to a sea piling during a vacation with
thoughts
of committing suicide.
Karen and her daughters moved out of Oskar's house in 1926 and, four
years later, moved to the U.S., eventually settling in Brooklyn. In the
1930's, Brooklyn was the intellectual
capital
of the world, due in part to the influx of Jewish refugees
from
Germany. it was here that she became friends with such intellectuals as
Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, even pausing to have an affair
with
the former. And it was here that she developed her theories on
neurosis,
based on her experiences as a psychotherapist.
She practiced, taught, and wrote until her death in 1952.
