Horney, Zen, and the Real Self

In the summer of 1952 Karen Horney traveled from her home in New York City to Japan to tour the major Zen monasteries in the company of her host, D. T. Suzuki, the renown interpreter of Zen Buddhism to the West. A pilgrimage of sorts, Horney's trip was the culmination of her deepening interest in Buddhism. She had cited Suzuki in her last two books and had met with him in the winter of 1950-51 while he was on a lecture tour in New York. Unfortunately, Horney never had the opportunity to develop fully her encounter with Buddhism. Soon after her return, she was diagnosed with cancer; two months later, at the age of 67, she died.

Horney's interest in Buddhism at the end of her life was not idle curiosity but the discovery of a philosophy that resonated with her own life's work. Through her writing, teaching, and clinical practice Horney committed herself to understanding the self as a means to deconstructing the inner conflicts that cause psychological suffering. The earliest stirrings of this quest led her away from conventional Christianity to Freudian psychoanalysis, and then, more self-consciously, away from Freud's theories to her own work. In Suzuki's writings Horney discovered ideas that validated her own theories and challenged her to think about the self—especially the real self—in new ways. Although we shall never know what might have come of Horney's encounter with Zen had she had more time to pursue it, we can consider the ways that Zen Buddhism began to change her thinking about the real self and its relationship to therapeutic practice.

Karen Horney's concept of the real self is the promise of healthy development and the hope of the therapeutic process. If a child is raised in a