Karen Horney, born Karen Danielsen on 16 September 1885 near Hamburg, Germany, trained in medicine and then in orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis in Berlin during the 1910s and 1920s, becoming a practicing analyst and teacher within the mainstream psychoanalytic establishment. She emigrated to the United States in 1932, first to Chicago and then to New York, where her growing disagreement with core elements of Freudian theory, particularly its emphasis on innate biological drive over social and cultural context, and its account of feminine psychology built around the concept of penis envy, brought her into open conflict with the psychoanalytic institutions she had trained within.
That conflict led to her formal expulsion from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941 for what her orthodox colleagues considered unacceptable theoretical deviation, after which she helped found the rival American Institute for Psychoanalysis the same year, becoming its dean and continuing to develop what became known as Neo-Freudian or culturalist psychoanalysis for the rest of her career. She died in New York on 4 December 1952.
Her 1926 to 1937 papers challenging Freud's account of feminine psychology, later collected as Feminine Psychology, argued that supposed female traits Freud attributed to biological drive were better explained by the specific social and cultural position women occupied, an argument that anticipated by decades the feminist critiques of psychoanalysis that became prominent later in the twentieth century.