The Unknown Karen Horney

This volume of writings by the distinguished psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885–1952) completes the publication of her unpublished and uncollected work. It includes pieces on feminine psychology and the relations between the sexes as well as on other aspects of psychoanalytic theory. The editor’s introductions set these works in context, showing their significance for Horney’s thought and their relation to her other writings.

The material in Part 1 provides an important supplement to Feminine Psychology, the book that established Horney as the first great psychoanalytic feminist. It reveals aspects of Horney’s early thought not fully developed elsewhere, along with the views about feminine psychology and the relations between the sexes that reflect her later thinking. Part 2 deepens our understanding of the final two phases of Karen Horney’s thought—her break with Freud and proposal of a new psychoanalytic paradigm in the 1930s, and her mature theory, developed in the 1940s. In presenting eighteen previously unpublished pieces, four essays that have not been available in English, and other texts that have been difficult to locate, this collection makes accessible an important segment of Horney’s work.