Stephen | Karin | née Costelloe

Identity area

Type of entity

Person

Authorized form of name

Stephen | Karin | née Costelloe

Parallel form(s) of name

    Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules

      Other form(s) of name

      • Stephen | Catherine Elizabeth

      Identifiers for corporate bodies

      Description area

      Dates of existence

      1890--1953

      History

      Catherine Elizabeth 'Karin' Stephen was born in 1890. She was a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and married Adrian Stephen (brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) just before the First World War; as conscientious objectors, they spent the war working on a dairy farm. After the war, they both became interested in training as psychoanalysts. In order to qualify, they trained as doctors and went into analysis with James Glover until his untimely death in 1926, when Karin went to Sylvia Payne and Adrian to Ella Sharpe. They were accepted as associate members of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1927; Adrian became a full member in 1930 and Karin in 1931.

      Karin entered private practice as a psychoanalyst. She gave the first course of lectures on psychoanalysis ever given at Cambridge University; these were highly successful and formed the basis of a book for medical students. She was active on the Public Lectures Committee of the British Psychoanalytical Society but was sometimes critical of the society and contributed to the Extraordinary Business Meetings held during the Controversial Discussions.

      During the Second World War, her husband, angered by anti-semitism, abandoned his pacifist stance and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as an army psychiatrist. Karin became a driver in the Queen’s Messenger Flying Squad Food Convoy. Karin Stephen suffered from increasingly severe deafness and from manic-depression; following the death of Adrian Stephen in 1948, her health deteriorated and she committed suicide in 1953.

      Places

      Legal status

      Functions, occupations and activities

      Psychologist and Psychoanalyst

      Mandates/sources of authority

      Internal structures/genealogy

      General context

      Relationships area

      Access points area

      Subject access points

      Place access points

      Occupations

      Control area

      Authority record identifier

      GB BPASA AR Stephen K

      Maintained by

      British Psychoanalytical Society Archive

      Institution identifier

      British Psychoanalytical Society Archive (ISDIAH, 2008)

      Rules and/or conventions used

      ISO 8601-1:2019, Date and time - Representations for information interchange.
      National Council on Archives - Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997.
      International Council on Archives - International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH), 2008.

      Status

      Revised

      Level of detail

      Partial

      Dates of creation, revision and deletion

      Revised 2024-04-04

      Language(s)

      • English

      Script(s)

      • Latin

      Sources

      Maintenance notes

      Revised by Ewan O'Neill