Introductions to Karin Stephen, ‘Relations between the Superego and the Ego’: Introduction I

was an early member of the British PsychoAnalytical Society, becoming an Associate Member in 1927 and a Member in 1931. After a successful undergraduate career in philosophy, she became a Fellow of Newnham College at Cambridge, and published a book on Henri Bergson in 1922. In 1912 she married Adrian Stephen, the brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and a younger member of the Bloomsbury Group. After the war, in which Adrian was a conscientious objector and the couple ran a dairy farm, they both decided to train to be psychoanalysts. Ernest Jones advised them to become medically qualified, so at the age of 30 they both became medical students. She was analysed first by James Glover and, after his death in 1925, by Sylvia Payne.

In her obituary notice Marion Milner (1954) describes Karin Stephen as ‘endowing whatever was done in her company, however ordinary, with a flavour of excitement, almost of escapade. And she herself… gave a peculiar impression of something more than life-size, a kind of shabby magnificence’. Operations to cure her deafness had not been successful and she had sustained a partial facial paralysis as a result; she also carried an ear trumpet.

Karin Stephen was a good lecturer on psychoanalytic concepts; in 1935 her second book, based on her course on the same topic - the first ever given at Cambridge University on psychoanalysis - was published. But she published little and, though she became a training analyst, this fact seemed to have escaped Milner when writing her obituary; her deafness must have been a handicap in this profession. In any event something seems to have not gone as well as her potential would have led people to expect, as Milner ends her obituary by calling her a

brave spirit constantly struggling against forces which finally overwhelmed her. Perhaps she should never have been an analyst or perhaps the attack on the unknown in human personality is the ascent of an Everest which must have its casualties; and these explorers