Public Lecture 1936: Fanaticism

Karin Stephen finished writing this paper on 22 October 1936 for a series of public lectures organized by her psychoanalyst colleague John Rickman. With this paper she sought to provide a psychoanalytic account of fascism against which she had protested with many others at the time of the Cable Street march of the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley on 4 October 1936. By then she had become involved with the anti-fascist organization For Intellectual Liberty, first formed on 5 December 1935. As for her ‘Fanaticism’ paper, she might also have been influenced in writing it by the struggle of her maternal grandparents against religious fanaticism in the USA, a struggle about which her sister Ray Strachey had written a novel, Shaken by the Wind: A Story of Fanaticism, published in 1927. Correspondence in the University of Reading Special Collections reveals that Karin Stephen had planned to develop the 1936 lecture into a book, signing a contract in 1936 to publish a book-length account of ‘Fanaticism’ in the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, edited by C.K. Ogden for Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. However, struggling to find the material she needed, Stephen never completed the book. The text for this unpublished lecture has been transcribed from a duplicate typewritten version of the original lecture deposited in the archive of the British Psychoanalytical Society by Noel Bradley (one of Karin Stephen's last psychoanalytic patients in the 1950s). For further context on Stephen, the lecture and its themes, see Sayers and Tyson, ‘Karin Stephen: Bloomsbury's Rebel Psychoanalyst’, in this issue. The British Psychoanalytical Society Archive has granted us kind permission to reproduce this lecture. Thanks especially to the archivist, Ewan O'Neill, for assistance.

Janet Sayers and Helen Tyson

Everyone is familiar with the state of mind of the person who, when a difficult situation arises, feels impatient of all attempt at delib