Karen Horney, Zen, and the Search for the Real Self

Karen Horney was one of the seminal and neglected psychoanalytic thinkers. She was “the first, and perhaps the best, critic of Freud’s ideas about women,” notes Susan Quinn (1987), who wrote the first full-scale biography of Horney, A Mind of Her Own. In “Flight from Womanhood,” in 1926, Horney wrote about what feminist critics of Freud “discovered fifty years later” (Quinn, 1987, p. 14). Horney both modified orthodox Freudian thinking about female psychology and replaced the biological underpinnings of the former with an emphasis on culture and human relationships. Her other ideas, for example, about the emphasis on the “here and now” and the illumination of narcissistic personalities, were denounced when she presented them but incorporated into psychoanalysis several decades later.