Karin Stephen

Karin Stephen (née Costelloe) (1890–1953) was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist.

Karin Stephen was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she became a Fellow. She married Adrian Stephen shortly before World War I; the couple, as conscientious objectors, spent the war working on a dairy farm. After the war, the couple trained as doctors and then went into analysis with James Glover; when he died in 1926, Karin continued with Sylvia Payne. Accepted as an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1927, she became a full member in 1931.^[1]

Stephen entered private practice as a psychoanalyst. She gave the first lecture course on psychoanalysis ever given at Cambridge University: the course of six lectures was repeated over several years, and formed the basis of her medical textbook Psychoanalysis and medicine.^[2] She suffered from deafness and manic depression. After her husband died in 1948, her health deteriorated and she committed suicide in 1953.^[1]

Leonard Woolf considered Stephen 'Old Bloomsbury'.^[3]

Her papers are held in the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society.^[4]

Works

• The misuse of mind; a study of Bergson's attack on intellectualism, New York: Harcourt, Brace; London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922. With a prefatory letter by Henri Bergson. In The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method.
• Psychoanalysis & medicine; a study of the wish to fall ill, New York: Macmillan; Cambridge: The University Press, 1933.

References

External links

• Works by Karin Stephen at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Karin Stephen at Internet Archive