Women's psychology according to Karen Horney

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

SIGNIFICANCE: Horney’s theories emphasize the effects of cultural influences on women’s personality development. Her theories modified classical psychoanalytic views and provided new insights into women’s interpersonal relationships.

Introduction

German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885-1952) considered people to be products of their environment as well as of biology. She stressed the ways in which cultural influences affect women’s personality development. These cultural influences include interpersonal relationships and society’s attitudes about women.

Cultural influences are overlooked by classical psychoanalysis—a system of psychology based on Freudian doctrine and procedure that seeks the root of human behavior in the , a region of the mind that is the seat of repressed impulses and experiences of which the conscious mind is unaware. Unconscious motivation and conflict, particularly sexual conflict, according to Horney, play an important role in women’s development. She viewed women as living in a male-oriented world in which they are judged by men according to male standards. Women have come to believe that these male-based standards represent their true nature. As a result, according to Horney, women live with the dilemma of having to choose between fulfilling their ambitions and meeting their needs for love by adhering to the passive role that society assigns to them. These circumstances contribute to depression and low .

Horney described three basic patterns of behavior by which people relate to others: moving toward (or self-effacing), moving away from (or distancing), and moving against (or expanding). Moving toward behavior involves dependency, taking care of others, and self-effacement. Women have been conditioned since birth to relate to others in this manner, according to Horney.

Relationship to Freudian Theory

Horney’s theories were modifications of classical psychoanalytic beliefs. Her theories are best understood when viewed in relation to the Freudian concepts that were prevalent during her lifetime. According to Sigmund Freud, who founded classical psychoanalysis during the late nineteenth century, biological influences determine human behavior. Of these biological factors, are the strongest motivators of human behavior. Neurosis, or mental disorder, was considered by Freud to be the result of unconscious sexual conflicts that began in early childhood.

Horney was grounded in psychoanalytic thinking and agreed with many of Freud’s concepts. She disagreed radically, however, with the heavy sexual content of Freudian theory. A major point of departure was the Freudian concept of penis envy. Freud essentially viewed all psychological problems in women to be the result of the woman’s inherent wish to be a man. Freud maintained that girls are not born with a natural sense of their femininity and regard themselves as inferior, castrated boys. As a result of penis envy, the female rebels against her biological inferiority. The consequences, according to Freud, are resentment, devaluation of her “negative sexual endowments,” envy of the opposite sex, and a constant search for compensation.

Horney considered penis envy to be contrary to biological thinking. She maintained that little girls are instinctively feminine and aware of their femaleness in early childhood. Thus, girls are not programmed to feel inferior. Women may envy men for the power and freedom they have in their private and professional lives, but women do not envy men’s genitals. The behaviors that Freud associated with penis envy—including greed, envy, and ambition—Horney attributed to the restrictions society places on females.

Horney also disagreed with the Freudian theory that viewed frigidity and masochism as biologically determined aspects of a woman’s nature. Frigidity, or the inability of a woman to experience sexual desire, is neither a normal condition for a woman nor an illness, according to Horney. She considered frigidity to be a symptom of an underlying psychological disturbance, such as chronic anxiety. Frequently, it is caused by tensions between marital partners. Powerful forces in society restrict a woman from the free expression of her sexuality. Custom and education promote female inhibitions. Men’s tendency to view their wives as spiritual partners and to look for sexual excitement with prostitutes or others whom they do not respect may also cause frigidity in wives, according to Horney.

Masochistic tendencies, wherein a woman seeks and enjoys pain and suffering, particularly in her sexual life, result from special social circumstances, Horney maintained. Freudian theory, holding that women are biologically programmed for masochism, is associated with the Freudian concept of the female as having been rendered less powerful than the male through castration. Horney, on the other hand, believed that society encourages women to be masochistic. Women are stereotyped as weak and emotional, as enjoying dependence, and these qualities are rewarded by men. Masochistic tendencies, according to Horney, are a way of relating by which a woman tries to obtain security and satisfaction through self-effacement and submission.

Horney’s theories stressed the positive aspects of femininity. As her ideas developed, she became more influenced by social scientists of her period. Her theories placed increasing emphasis on interpersonal and social attitudes in determining women’s feelings, relations, and roles. Her ideas about the development of women’s sexuality were focused on adolescent girls rather than on young children, as in Freudian theory. According to Horney, adolescents develop attitudes to cope with sexual conflict, and these attitudes carry over into adulthood.

New Approach to Women and Relationships

Horney’s theories opened the door for new ways of understanding women’s personalities and relationships. In a 1984 study of women’s reactions to separation and loss, psychotherapist Alexandra Symonds found Horney’s theories to be relevant to what she encountered in her female patients. Writing in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Symonds reported female reaction to separation and loss to be a frequent motivation for women to enter therapy. In contrast, she found that men come into therapy in these circumstances mainly because of pressure from a wife or girlfriend. According to Symonds, women are more eager than men to create relationships, and women express more feelings when relationships end.

Symonds considered these behaviors from the viewpoint of the three basic patterns of behavior described by Horney: moving toward, moving away from, and moving against. Symonds viewed the moving toward, self-effacing type of behavior as a love-oriented, or dependent pattern. She viewed the moving away from, detached type as a freedom-oriented pattern, and the moving-against, expansive type as power-oriented pattern. According to Symonds’s views, society assigns the love-oriented, dependent pattern to women, while men are encouraged to develop power- and freedom-oriented patterns. She described a frequent combination in a couple to be a detached, expansive, power-oriented man married to a dependent, self-effacing, love-oriented woman. Relationships often develop between a silent, strong, withdrawn, noncommunicative man and a loving, dependent woman who often wants to talk about feelings.

As people develop character patterns, such as love-oriented and dependent, they suppress feelings that cause inner conflicts, such as aggressiveness, according to Symonds. By contrast, power-oriented people suppress dependent feelings. People idealize their self-values and feel contempt for what is suppressed; thus, the power-oriented person views dependency and need as contemptible weaknesses. This contempt is conveyed to those who are aware of their dependency needs. Women then add self-hate for needing others to the anxiety they feel when a relationship ends.

Extremely dependent, self-effacing women often stay in poor and even abusive relationships rather than separate, according to Symonds. They are victims of a culture that considers a woman nothing of significance unless they are attached to a man. Symonds found these women to come from two different backgrounds: either having been held close by their mother or father during childhood and adolescence, thus having no opportunity for healthy growth, or having separated prematurely from their parents in childhood in an effort to become self-sufficient at an early age, often having developed a facade of self-sufficiency with deep, unresolved dependency needs.

Understanding Fear of Success

Horney’s theories predicted the anxiety women feel about their own ambition and the ways in which women sabotage their competence and success. In the book Women in Therapy (1988), psychotherapist Harriet Goldhor Lerner discusses female work inhibition in the light of Horney’s theories. Lerner views work inhibition as an unconscious attempt to preserve harmony within a relationship as well as to allay fears of being unfeminine. Women often fear success because they fear they will pay dearly for their accomplishments. Women frequently equate success, or the wish for it, with the loss of femininity and attractiveness, loss of significant relationships, loss of health, or even loss of life. Feelings of depression and anxiety are ways women either apologize for their competence and success on the one hand or ensure the lack of success on the other hand, according to Lerner. She views self-sacrifice or self-sabotage to be other common ways women react to their feelings of guilt and anxiety about becoming successful.

When faced with the choice (real or imagined) of sacrificing the self to preserve a relationship or strengthening the self at the risk of threatening a relationship, women often choose the former, according to Lerner. She applies Horney’s views to the situation of a thirty-year-old married woman who entered therapy because of personal distress and marital tension over her desire to enroll in graduate school and embark on a career. Lerner found that multigenerational guilt on the part of the woman was involved, as well as fears of destroying her marriage. The woman’s husband was opposed to his wife’s enrolling in graduate school. In addition, the woman was the first female in her family to aspire to graduate school. In the face of these circumstances, she put aside her ambitions to preserve harmony in her relationships. The woman’s work inhibition involved profound anxiety and guilt over striving for things previous generations of women in her family could not have. Work inhibition also may result when a woman perceives her strivings as “too masculine,” a perception Lerner sees as reinforced by society. Being labeled “masculine” triggers deep guilt and anxiety in women.

Background and Accomplishments

Horney’s theories on female psychology developed from a series of papers she wrote over a thirteen-year period in response to Freud’s views on female sexuality. The last paper was published after Horney emigrated to the United States from Germany at a highly productive point in her career.

As one of the first women admitted to medical school in Berlin, she completed her psychiatric and psychoanalytic training by 1913. By that time, Freud had passed the peak of his greatest creative years. Horney was thirty years younger than Freud and a product of the twentieth century. Her views were more in tune with the relatively open structure of twentieth-century science than with the more closed science of Freud’s period. Horney was influenced greatly by sociologists of her time. She and other , such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Alfred Adler, and Erich Fromm, were the first psychoanalysts to emphasize cultural influences on personality development.

Horney’s theories grew out of a need for a feminine psychology different from male psychology. She believed that women were being analyzed and treated according to a male-oriented psychology that considered women to be biologically inferior to males. She did not find these male theories supported by what she observed in her female patients or in her own life experience.

Horney was the first female doctor to challenge male theory and went on to take a position in the foreground of the psychoanalytic movement. She was a controversial figure, and her career involved many disputes with the established psychoanalytic world. She and her followers eventually were ostracized by the establishment, and for a time, her name disappeared from the psychoanalytic literature. Her biographers attribute this to a fear on the part of some Freudians of being contaminated by association with her ideas.

Modern-Day Impact

A growing interest in Horney’s work occurred during the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. The women’s movement brought her name back into the literature as a pioneer in upgrading women’s status. Her name began appearing more frequently in literature associated with women’s therapy. The series of influential books she wrote throughout her career remained popular into the twenty-first century and continued to be used as textbooks, including The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939). She also wrote Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), which outline her research on interpersonal relationships and their impact on neuroses and mental health.

An independent thinker, Horney is considered an individual who was always ahead of her time. Her work anticipated a revival of interest in the narcissistic personality. Her theories predicted popular trends in psychology, although she is often not credited for her ideas. One of these trends is the increasing emphasis on social and cultural factors as causes of emotional illness. Systems theory is another popular trend related to Horney’s concepts. Systems theory, which includes a type of psychology called family therapy, emphasizes the continuous interaction between cultural conditions, interpersonal relations, and inner emotional experience.

The Karen Horney Foundation was established Horney's memory just after her death. To honor Horny’s achievements and contributions to the development of feminist psychology, the Karen Horney Clinic opened in New York City in 1955. The clinic remains in operation in the twenty-first century, offering low-cost psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic services to individuals in need, specializing in depression, anxiety, and relationship issues. The clinic also offers quality training for young professionals, including the students of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Balsam, Rosemary. “Freud, Females, Childbirth, and Dissidence: Margarete Hilferding, Karen Horney, and Otto Rank.” The Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 100, no. 5, 2013, pp. 695–716, doi:10.1521/prev.2013.100.5.695. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.

Berger, Milton M., ed. Women beyond Freud: New Concepts of Feminine Psychology. 1993. Routledge, 2013.

Cherry, Kendra. "Contributions of Karen Horney to Psychology." Verywell Mind, 13 Nov. 2023, www.verywellmind.com/karen-horney-biography-2795539. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Enns, Carolyn Zerbe. “Cultural Feminist Theory and Feminist Therapy.” Feminist Theories and Feminist Psychotherapies. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2012.

Green, Sheila. “Female Development: Traditional Approaches.” The Psychological Development of Girls and Women: Rethinking Change in Time. Routledge, 2014.

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Karen Horney: Pioneer of Feminine Psychology. Chelsea, 2005.

Horney, Karen. Feminine Psychology. 1967. Norton, 1993.

Horney, Karen. “The Problem of Feminine Masochism.” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 100, no. 5, 2013, pp. 675–94, doi:10.1521/prev.2013.100.5.675. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.

Lerner, Harriet Goldhor. Women in Therapy. 1988. Harper, 1992.

Nickerson, Charlotte. "Karen Horney: Theory and Contributions to Psychology." Simply Psychology, 25 Jan. 2024, www.simplypsychology.org/karen-horney-biography.html. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Paris, Bernard J. Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding. Yale UP, 1996.

Quinn, Susan. A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney. Other, 2003.

Rubins, Jack L. Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis. Dial, 1978.

Solomon, Irving. Karen Horney and Character Disorder: A Guide for the Modern Practitioner. Springer, 2006.

Symonds, Alexandra. “Separation and Loss: Significance for Women.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 45, no. 1, 1985, pp. 53–58, doi:10.1007/BF01262791. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.