1885-1952
Psychoanalyst

From Germany to the United States.

On 22 September 1932 a German psychoanalyst who was to influence American psychotherapy and personality theory greatly arrived in the United States. Dr. Karen Horney accepted a job offer from her former student, Hungarian analyst Franz Alexander, as assistant director of his newly established Psychoanalytic Institute in Chicago. Horney received her M.D. degree at the University of Freiburg in 1913 and underwent psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham, a friend and close associate of Sigmund Freud. She enjoyed her life in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, but the 1929 Wall Street crash with its resulting economic hardship and the growth of Nazism encouraged her to accept Alexander's offer. Horney worked briefly at the Chicago institute and then moved to New York City, where she joined the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The New School for Social Research had set up a University...