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The comments by Brearley (2000a, 2000b) and by Hinshelwood (2000) on Karin Stephen's recently published 1945 paper (Stephen 2000) indicate the need, fifty years after it was given, for further information.
Brearley's remark that ‘she also carried an ear trumpet’ gives an impression of her that seems incompatible with the practice of psychoanalysis, not simply a handicap. He based his statement on Marion Milner's (1954) obituary notice in which, after saying, ‘It is difficult to write about Karin Stephen without also writing about her husband, Adrian Stephen’, she added that many of their fellow students at medical school in the early 1920s would recall them, then in their early thirties: ‘he tall and gaunt, she short and sturdy—with an ear trumpet—coming in late for lectures and sitting in the front row’ (p. 432). Brearley implied that she continued to use an ear trumpet more than twenty years later. For how long and in what circumstances she did so seems unknown: her niece wrote that a final operation in 1925 ‘was extremely successful in improving her hearing …’ (B. Strachey 1980, p. 283).1 When Adrian and Karen Stephen consulted Ernest Jones in 1920 about becoming psychoanalysts he had not discouraged her, and, in 1933, in the preface to her book on the wish to fall ill, praised ‘her … thorough firsthand knowledge of the subject [that] has enabled her to convey a great deal of both the principles and practice of psychoanalysis’ (K. Stephen 1933, p. vii, emphasis added). Her appointment as training analyst likewise counters the impression Brearley conveyed of her as an analyst.
My experience in 1948 should clear up any uncertainty about the consequences of her hearing deficit at that time, however far back earlier it held, probably at least since 1925. Recently arrived from New Zealand, I was unaware of the divisions in the British Psycho-Analytical Society so that, when after my acceptance for training I was asked to choose between the two training schemes, A or B,