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I am going to sketch for you a portrait of Karen Horney emphasizing two features: her remarkable strong sense of self-determination and the seeming happenstance of being in the right place at the right time. She collaborated with fate. She prescribed everything for it and fate facilitated opportunities.
Horney was a very private person. It is only due to our coming, after her death, upon her diaries written in her adolescence and early twenties that this remarkable young person made her appearance and shed much light on later happenings. We owe the real discovery of the diaries to my sister Renate. We had casually noted their existence. They then gathered dust on Renate's bookshelves in Mexico, when by some magical spiritual happening she discovered them, transcribed them, had them translated, and published them. All of Karen's early entries, beginning at age 13, beguile with confident self-determination of her path, her actions, and her thinking. She writes, “Fate will have an easy time with me, I prescribe everything for it” (Horney, , p. 19). She aims at being a doctor, even though as yet no German university is admitting women to medical school. She has no doubt that she will find a way. The word ambition does not convey her spirit. She just makes her decision and follows her mapped-out road. The diaries are never boring. She reflects on happenings, debates, asks big questions about religion, mores, love, morality, and truth, and declares her opinion.