Karin Stephen

Who was Karin Stephen?

Karin Stephen 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.

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. She suffered from deafness and manic depression. After her husband died in 1948, her health deteriorated and she committed suicide in 1953.

Leonard Woolf considered Stephen 'Old Bloomsbury'.

Her papers are held in the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society.