Karin Stephen: Bloomsbury's Rebel Psychoanalyst

Abstract

This paper highlights the important contribution to psychoanalysis made by the psychoanalyst Karin Stephen. Following in the footsteps of other feminist biographers and historians of psychoanalysis, who have worked to bring ‘Freud’s women’ out of the shadows, this article not only focuses on Karin Stephen’s role within the internal political struggles of the British Psychoanalytical Society during the Second World War, but also shows how her psychoanalytic writings can be read in the context of her political activism in the 1930s. Beginning with a biographical account of Stephen’s early life and marriage in October 1914 to Virginia Woolf’s brother, Adrian Stephen, the paper goes on to explore the impact of Karin Stephen’s political activism on her psychoanalytic writing. The article examines Stephen’s arguments, in both her published and her unpublished writings, about the capacity for psychoanalysis to respond to the political crises of the 1930s and 1940s by offering patients freedom from servility to the ‘raging dictator[s]’ within and beyond the inner world of their minds.