Janowitz Naomi
Religious Studies, University of California-Davis, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
Am J Psychoanal. 2025 Jun;85(2):236-247. doi: 10.1057/s11231-025-09514-9.
Karen Horney's masterful pieces "The Dread of Women" (1932) and "Flight from Womanhood" (1926) influenced not only psychoanalysts but students of culture in general. On the eighty-fifth anniversary of the journal she founded, we can look both back at these pieces and consider how dread and envy of women might be affected by the changes in gender identities, developments that Horney would have eagerly followed. In the decades since she described dread and envy of women, feminism has been unable to dislodge the basic binary, indeed hierarchy, of male/female. Trans and non-binary identities are toppling many standard ways of thinking about sexuality and gender. Are we entering a new age when repressive boundaries of gender and sexuality will be overthrown, or as psychoanalysts, should we be focusing on the always enigmatic core of sexuality, where Horney's dread of women will continue to flourish?
