Karen Horney

Born Karen Danielsen in Germany on 16 September 1885, she trained as a psychoanalyst in the Freudian tradition before emigrating to the United States. There she began questioning the master's core assumptions — particularly his theories of sexuality and the notion that instinct drives everything. She rejected the idea of inherent psychological differences between men and women, insisting with Alfred Adler that society and culture, not biology, shaped those divides. That stance founded feminist psychology as a distinct field. She continued practicing and teaching her revised psychoanalysis in A…