Karen Horney's Feminine Psychology

When Freud discovered the importance of sexuality in the genesis of neurosis, showing that it is not a late acquisition in man but one intimately linked to the earliest developmental processes, and when he described the sexual behavior of boys and girls, the stages it goes through and the supposed consequences of anatomical differences, a new conceptualization of women was launched that seemed almost impossible to modify and transcend. Karen Horney is one of the psychoanalysts who, timidly at first but with considerable courage later on, brought about a revolution regarding the understanding of women as total human beings within their surrounding environment. In order to better understand this shift, let's briefly review the personal and theoretical roots of both authors, as well as their evolution and what they represent in psychology, psychopathological theory, and human relations theory.

Freud and Horney differed in age by 30 years, and the span of a generation made it possible for Horney to transcend the philosophy of science in which Freud was immersed as a product of his times, the end of the 19th century. The social and cultural differences between them are wide. Freud originated within a minority group condemned to ostracism and grew up in a traditional Jewish household where the man was lord and master of the second-class woman. The family was patriarchal and Freud was his mother's favorite child. The sexual mores within which he grew up were puritan and Victorian, and it is therefore not surprising that his theory has a masculine, mechanistic, and immutable character, since those were the paradigms of science at the time.

Horney, on the other hand, belongs within the changes ushered in by the 20th century with a less rigid idea of what science is about, whereby values which are not mechanically measured — such as aesthetics, ethics, relativity-were being tolerated alongside “scientific” and “exact” sciences.

Born into a middle-class, Protestant family of a No