Karen Danielsen (later Horney) was born in Blankenese, near Hamburg, Germany, on September 16, 1885.
Karen Clementine Theodore Danielsen was born on September 16, 1885, in the small village of Blankenese, near Hamburg, Germany, into a household headed by her father, a strict Norwegian sea captain, and her mother, a Dutch woman of more liberal temperament. This mixed household of religious conservatism and intellectual curiosity would shape much of Horney's early psychological development and later theoretical interests.
Growing up in a patriarchal household where her father favored her brother, young Karen developed an early sense of the gender inequities that would later become central to her groundbreaking psychoanalytic theories challenging Freudian orthodoxy on female psychology. Her mother's support allowed her to pursue education at a time when German women faced significant barriers to academic and professional life.
This date is well-documented across multiple authoritative biographical sources, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, though a minority of secondary sources have listed September 15; the weight of scholarly evidence supports September 16 as the accurate date. Her birth marks the beginning of a life that would fundamentally reshape psychoanalytic theory, particularly regarding the psychology of women, and establish her as one of the most influential psychoanalysts and founders of the neo-Freudian school of thought.
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