Karin Stephen 1889–1953

It is difficult to write about Karin Stephen without also writing about her husband Adrian Stephen, whose obituary appeared in this Journal in 1948. Together, in 1920, after both having had distinguished careers in other fields, they decided that 'the study of human personality was the most interesting and important task for anyone in our generation, it was the growing edge of knowledge'. So, giving up their other work, they set about becoming trained as analysts; this meant settling down, when both were over thirty, as first year medical students, amongst young men and women straight from school. Many of their fellow students will remember them as an arresting couple, he tall and gaunt, she short and sturdy—with an ear trumpet—coming in late for lectures and sitting in the front row. For those who had the privilege of coming to know them as friends it was soon clear that here was a unique and fascinating combination of arresting personalities. Essentially, wherever they lived, they created an atmosphere of spaciousness. Together with the spaciousness there was also an easy unconventionality, particularly in their holiday home on an East Coast creek; it had been an inn where laden barges used to call, for the high spring tides would reach right up to its walls; and there the shining east coast air and sharp salty tang of the mud seemed somehow symbolic of so much that was also in them. There was always a readiness for every kind of adventure, whether intellectual or physical; often the two were combined, as when, out in their sailing-boat, a vivid discussion of psycho-analytic theory would be suddenly interrupted by finding the boat had run on a mud bank. How they escaped major disasters seemed something of a miracle, and they did once lose their mast when out to sea off Harwich. But apart from such special adventures, Karin particularly had a gift for endowing whatever was done in her company, however ordinary, with a flavour of excitement, almost of escap