Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward Self-Realization

Karen Horney

Apr 2011 · Blackstone Audio Inc. · Narrated by Heather Henderson

About this audiobook

One of the most original psychoanalysts after Freud, Karen Horney pioneered such now-familiar concepts as alienation, self-realization, and the idealized image, and she brought to psychoanalysis a new understanding of the importance of culture and environment.

Karen Horney was born in Hamburg in 1885 and studied at the University of Berlin, receiving her medical degree in 1913. From 1914 to 1918 she studied psychiatry at Berlin-Lankwitz, Germany, and from 1918 to 1932 taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. She participated in many international congresses, among them the historic discussion of lay analysis chaired by Sigmund Freud.

Dr. Horney came to the United States in 1932 and for two years was associate director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 1934 she came to New York and was a member of the teaching staff of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute until 1941, when she became one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.

In Neurosis and Human Growth, Dr. Horney discusses the neurotic process as a special form of human development: the antithesis of healthy growth. She unfolds the different stages of this situation, describing neurotic claims, the tyranny of inner dictates, and the neurotic’s solutions for relieving the tensions of conflict in such emotional attitudes as domination, self-effacement, dependency, or resignation. Throughout, she outlines with penetrating insight the forces that work for and against the person’s realization of his or her potentialities.

Ratings and reviews

Karen Horney (pronounced Har-nigh) was a great thinker and investigator of illnesses now better understood physically by science, one being the Sisyphean dual thinking of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I wish Horney and Alfred Adler could have known that the "neuroses" they investigate so precisely often if not always result from somatic disorders of thought and memory instead of exaggerated personal feelings that by themselves probably wouldn't cause anyone to become gravely ill. A+ audiobook.

About the author

Karen Horney, MD, (1885–1952) was one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. Her books include The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, Our Inner Conflicts, Self-Analysis, Feminine Psychology, Final Lectures, and, as editor, Are You Considering Psychoanalysis?

Heather Henderson is a voice talent, theater critic, and dramaturg. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she has voiced hundreds of commercial and educational projects, and her arts reviews and poems have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country. She holds MFA and DFA degrees from the Yale School of Drama. She lives in Oregon.