In 1922, at a panel over which Sigmund Freud presided during a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Congress, a young Berlin-trained psychoanalyst delivered a paper that began one of the fiercest and longest debates in psychoanalytic theory. The analyst--the first woman ever to deliver a paper on feminine psychology at an international psychoanalytic meeting--was Karen Horney, and the paper, "On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women," was her famous response to the claim of her own psychoanalyst, Karl Abraham, that all women unconsciously envy the penis and want to be men. As she gave her paper, Horney was nervous but respectful. She carefully acknowledged the extraordinary significance of Freud's work before going on to deliver a searing analysis of the masculinist bias of most of his theories on women. This challenge to Freudian psychoanalytic theory set the tone for Horney's subsequent career.

When in 1932 Horney moved to the...