In the final years of her life Horney developed a serious interest in Zen Buddhism, drawn to what she read as parallels between the Zen concept of a person's true, unconditioned nature and her own psychoanalytic theory of the real self obscured by neurotic self-alienation. She corresponded with and met the scholar D. T. Suzuki, the most influential interpreter of Zen Buddhism to a Western audience in the twentieth century, first in New York during his 1950 to 1951 lecture tour and citing his work in her final two books.
In the summer of 1952 Horney traveled to Japan at Suzuki's invitation to visit major Zen monasteries directly, a trip she undertook as the practical culmination of that deepening intellectual and personal interest. She returned to New York and was diagnosed with cancer soon afterward, dying only months later, before she had the opportunity to develop the Zen-psychoanalysis synthesis her late writing and travel suggest she was working toward. The atlas records this documented but genuinely unfinished intersection honestly, as an interrupted direction rather than a completed body of thought.
Horney's own late writing, including Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), had already developed a concept of the real self obscured by compulsive, anxiety driven strategies of the neurotic personality, a framework she and later commentators, including Suzuki's own collaborator Richard De Martino, read as strikingly close to Zen Buddhism's account of an authentic nature obscured by grasping and illusion, even though the two traditions had developed the idea independently of one another.