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In this presentation, Marianne Horney Eckardt, the respected psychoanalyst and a daughter of Karen Horney, provided an overview of the political, cultural, and philosophical environment that influenced her mother's intellectual development. In general, Eckardt focused on the social and political ferment in Europe from the turn of the century through the 1920s. She directed attention to the predominant phallo-centrism and patriarchal morality of that period and contrasted these with new challenges that were beginning to find voices.
Eckardt indicated the thinkers who contributed to the evolution of thought affecting Horney. She spoke of the ideas of Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and Carl Dellago. She also described the writings of Georg Simmel and the impact of the works of Otto Gross in which the ideal of self-realization is elaborated. This concept was to become central to Horney's later writings.
After summarizing the fin de siecle metamorphosis of thought concerning masculinity and femininity, Eckardt considered certain of the pioneering women thinkers of the era, most notably Ellen Key and Helen Stoecker. It was Key, in particular, who stressed the importance of “healthy instincts” in children and believed that women needed to claim a place in the world as women. These positions proved quite compelling to the young Horney.
Stoecker, according to Eckardt, was a psychoanalyst as well as a social and political thinker. She argued for a new morality aimed at the liberation of women. “One sex should never dispose over the other to such a great extent” as it did in the society of her time. Stoecker, like Horney, was a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. Both were influenced by its founder, Karl Abraham. Eckardt contrasted the Berlin group with the institute in Vienna, “the high temple where Freud presided.” In the former, psychoanalysis was regarded as a new science whose practitioners had the spirit of innovators and pioneers, rather than as “guardians of the hol