How were Horney’s views of personality influenced by her childhood experiences?
Karen Horney was an early feminist. She was instructed, in berlin, as a Freudian psychoanalyst. The relationship of her mother with her father was not good and her mother stated that she desired her spouse to be dead. Her father was much older than her mother. Her mother favored her brother more and her father always used to underrate her intelligence.
As a result of this the feeling of unwanted, hostility, inferiority and worthlessness developed in Karen. This absence of love from parents encouraged her to develop a theory of basic anxiety. In all her writings, Karen used to sense the meaning of her existence and struggled to overcome her own difficulties. Later she got married and gave birth to three daughters, with whom there were regular conflicts.
Her marital relation was also not good. She had frequent complaints of abdominal pains and thoughts of killing herself. She had extra-marital affairs and at last she ended her marriage. Her psychoanalyst said that she longed for the powerful man because of childhood oedipal craving for her strong father. When she realized that Freudian analysis was proving to be futile, she began to self-analyze her problems.
She was more attracted to Adler’s theory. According to her, getting involved in the promiscuous relations and medical field, she was behaving more like a man. This made her feel superior. Later she was also involved with the younger boys, most of whom were getting trained under supervision. However, she did not develop any attachment with them.
She was trained in Berlin; however, she did not agree with all the Freud’s theories. She wrote several journals, which were related to the female’s personality and the problems associated with the females’ sexuality. Because of her growing disinterest with the Freud’s theories, she broke with the Freudian group and developed the Psychoanalysis institute in America.