Karen Horney – 1885-1952

Born in Germany, Horney became a physician and an apostle of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. She practiced psychiatry in Germany until 1932, when she came to Chicago as director of the Institute for Psychoanalysis. She later practiced in New York City. Horney made a radical departure from Freud by arguing, in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), that environmental and social conditions—instinctual drives—were principal shapers of personality and causes of neurosis. It was a revolutionary philosophical, sociological, and psychological theory.