Karen Horney on Feminine Psychology

In The “Postscript” to “An Autobiographical Study”¹ written in 1925, Freud stated that he was “At the very climax of my psychoanalytic work, in 1912.” He added that “since I put forward my hypothesis of the existence of two kinds of instinct (Eros and the death instinct) and since I proposed a division of the mental personality into an ego, a super-ego, and an id (in 1923), I have made no further decisive contributions to psychoanalysis.”

Between 1912 and 1923, Horney received her medical degree in Berlin and completed her psychiatric and psychoanalytic training there; wrote her first psychoanalytic paper (“The Technique of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” 1917)²; became a valued member³ of the teaching staff of the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; and published the first (“On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women”¹) of her series of papers on feminine psychology.

Freud was almost thirty years Horney's senior. During the period when she was acquiring the training and tools for the most productive period of her life which was yet ahead of her, Freud was feeling that the peak of his greatest creative powers had been reached and passed. This evaluation, in 1935, could have been contributed to by his life and work being “no longer in freedom from pain” since 1923, when “a malignant disease”¹ was discovered. Compared to The Interpretation of Dreams , which appeared when he was forty-four, what followed would seem less in the eyes of a genius, so rigorously self-critical. He wrote about it in the “Foreword” to the Third English Edition: “Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime” (March 15, 1931), with which most truly creative people would concur.

Also, after 1923, Freud's interests were coming full circle, culminating in his last book, Moses and Monotheism .⁴ “My interest, after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psycho-therapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, wh