Karen Clementia Theodora Danielson was born to Wackels and Sonni Danielson in Eilbek, Germany, on September 15, 1885, (378). Danielson would demonstrate a gifted intellect at an early age, the first women to enter an accelerated high school known as the Hamburg Realgymnasium. She would later be one of the first to study medicine at the University of Freiburg. DanielsonÆs mother was a homemaker and her father was a sea captain whose absence made Karen feel ôalienatedö from him, (378). It was at the University of Freiburg where Danielson met her husband, Oskar Horney. In 1909 the couple married and moved to Berlin.
Karen Horney received her medical degree in 1915 from the University of Berlin, eventually becoming the first female professor at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1932, Horney moved to New York at a time when recognition was growing for her psychoanalytic theories in conflict with FreudÆs. In 1939, Horney divorced her husband after years of separation. She began to publish a series of books that would illustrate her new theories and antagonize her peers. In 1941 she helped found the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, she served as founder and dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, and she was the founder and editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (378). Horney died in New York City in 1952.
Horney experienced a number of roadblocks to her considerable success. Her childhood was one of alienation from her father, who spent much of his time away from home. She nevertheless excelled in her academic ambitions. Her theories on psychoanalysis and personality were widely regarded as the work of a major intellectual talent, but they flew directly in the face of theories established by the ôGodö of psychoanalysis and personality, Sigmund Freud. When Horney published New Ways in Psychoanalysis, one biographer notes that the work ôtook a critical stand agains
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