Karen Horney

If we really fast-forward to Western psychology in the 1940s and '50s, you'll see psychoanalysts introduce ideas like people pleasing into topics related to neuroses.

Uh, in 1945, Karen Horney, a German psychoanalyst, wrote Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis, and she proposed that there were these three basic strategies for handling anxiety.

You can move toward people, move against people, or move away from people.

And moving toward people is, again, basically people pleasing.

He just kind of thought that women, like he c- it was kind of an afterthought for him.

So these ideas are naturally crazy, let's just call it as we see it, and they were naturally challenged at the time within the psychoanalytic, like psychoanalytical community, specifically by a woman called Karen Horney.

She was a German psychoanalyst operating at the same time as Freud, and she basically heard this theory and was like, "That is insane.

You have...

Plus, psychoanalysis tends to involve many sessions, sometimes four or five a week, over a long period of time, and health insurance just won't cover that anymore.

Therapists who have branched off from the psychoanalytic school fall into the psychodynamic family, which includes not just Freudian theory, but also ideas from Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and others.

The terms psychoanalytic and psychodynamic are often confused, but you can think of psychoanalysis as Freud's particular baby, while psychodynamic theory is really the family descended from that baby.

Similar to psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapy focuses on helping people gain insight on the impact of unconscious internal forces, early relationships, and critical childhood experiences.

But I thought I wanted to start a group of women biographers that would meet regularly once a month.

And I already had a friend, Susan Quinn, who'd written a biography of Karen Horney, the pioneering psychoanalyst who refuted Freud's penis envy thing.

Wonderful biography.

And she was working on Marie Curie, And between the two of us, we came up with, I think, four other people.

Um, and part of the reason I think that we have this, there's a, a, a few reasons we can go into for a moment, which is one of them is I think envy on the part of males.

Because females, I got a lot of this analysis from Karen Horney, um, um, that women create life with their bodies, and nature creates life naturally.

And that's great if men recognize that our role is that we're ess-essentially reproductively redundant, that most men, you know, you need a few, but, but most men...

If you had 100 people in a village, 50 men, 50 women, and 49 women die, your village is done.

That I cannot lose, and it's the same thing here.

And this, this, you have, you have brought us to the central point of patriarchy, and I'm really grateful, especially to Lear Keith for this analysis, and Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly.

And but it's that if I am feeling inferior to you, like we were talking about earlier with the whole sort of woman be Karen Horney stuff.

Mm-hmm.