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Susan Quinn, the recognized biographer of Horney, differentiated Karen Horney's analytic thinking from the orthodoxy of her day. She elaborated upon those personal and familial characteristics that enabled Horney to develop into one of the most original thinkers of her time. Quinn noted the impossibility of attempting to examine Horney via a “brick by brick” reconstruction utilizing available historical data. Instead, she attempted to clarify those unique and lifelong characteristics that may have led Horney to her achievements.
Quinn referred to Carol Gilligan's early admonition to her to question “received” information about Horney whose work was often dismissed by the classical establishment as being simplistic and of minor import, noting that women are often dismissed in this fashion. Quinn further asserted that many of Horney's ideas were appropriated by others, such as Ernest Jones, without attribution. She noted that Horney's paper, “The Problem of the Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” anticipated Anna Freud's influential book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Furthermore, Horney's writings on narcissism predated those of Kohut and Lasch by decades.
In Quinn's view, Horney's greatest contributions were written prior to her emigration to the United States in 1932. Her “series of fourteen papers on the psychology of women constitute a daring and persuasive counter to Freud's theory of female sexual development.” Horney augmented Freud's biocentrism with observations regarding the roles of social and cultural factors.
Quinn sought to link Horney's accomplishments with such personal attributes as her unflagging intensity of purpose, curiosity, and exceptional intelligence. She drew the conclusion that Horney's intellectual capacity and intensity of feeling were joined by a deep independence, probably resulting from a family structure in which she was “parentified” by a distant, authoritarian father and a needy mother. Nevertheless, Quinn questioned her own form