Women in Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Women in Psychology - Essay Example Karen Horney maintained additional views of children and the onset of anxiety, granting her respect in the psychological community. This project describes the background of Karen Horney and highlights her many contributions to psychology. Karen Horney (1885-1952) grew up in Hamburg, Germany to more affluent, upper-middle-class parents with a Protestant background. Horney’s father was a deeply religious man and a ship captain while her mother was a more liberal thinker who promoted Horney to succeed in medical school (Smith, 2007). This was during a period in the early 20th Century when women had not yet achieved the right to vote, making Horney’s arrival in medical school in 1906 a monumental event, especially with her focus on studying Freud’s viewpoints on psychoanalysis (Eckardt, 2005). In the 1920’s, Horney began to challenge Freud’s viewpoint on masculinity and femininity, especially in areas of sexual development and sexual instinct. She began to criticize Freud’s perspective in which he believed that women felt inferior to men because they did not have a penis (Eckardt). Horney felt that this was a very one-sided perspective, riddled with masculine narcissism, which consistently created bias against women during psychoanalysis. Over time, Horney redeveloped Freud’s view on feminine sexuality and created a new template by which women are assessed: One in which the absence of a penis no longer became the perceived foundation of women’s troubles. In a sense, based on the women’s suffrage movements occurring during this time period, Horney managed to liberate women when being analyzed for psychological study as more than merely the product of masculine envy. Sigmund Freud laid the foundation for many of the views of the time regarding anxiety and the development of positive personality traits. Over the years, Karen Horney redeveloped the view of anxiety by suggesting that anxiety is not