Factors Contributing Karen Danielson's Contribution To Psychology

Karen Danielson was born on September 16, 1885 to Berndt Wackels Danielson and Clotilde née van Ronzelen in Blankenese, Germany. At the age of nine, Karen developed a crush on one of her older brothers who soon pushed her away leading her to begin suffering from depression effecting her for the rest of her life. After her mother left her father, Karen entered medical school at University of Freiburg, she transferred to one other school before graduating from University of Berlin in 1913. She married Oskar Horney in 1909 which is how she became known as Karen Horney. She moved from Germany to Brooklyn in 1930. She quickly established herself and became the Associate Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. It was in Brooklyn where she developed and …show more content…
“The view that women are infantile and emotional creatures, and as such, incapable of responsibility and independence is the work of the masculine tendency to lower women’s self-respect” (Feminine Psychology, 1932). Freud believed that women had poor superegos and suffered “penis envy”. He suggested that women were resentful of men for having a penis and felt inferior. Horney rebutted this claim by saying men suffered from “womb envy”. The degree to how a man is driven to succeed may simply be a substitute for the fact that they are not able to carry, nurture and bear children. They were jealous of the woman’s ability to have a child. Womb envy is created unconsciously to make women feel inferior. Horney did not deny that women may feel inferior to men, instead she questioned Freud’s reasoning on why women had those feelings. She believed that women felt inferior to men because of societal reasons rather than being born a woman. This belief of inferiority may cause a women to wish she were a man. Horney called this the flight of womanhood, a condition that can lead to sexual