author
Karin Stephen
1889–1953
A thoughtful early psychoanalyst and psychologist, she moved from philosophy into the new world of psychoanalysis and helped bring those ideas to a wider audience. Her work connected the Bloomsbury circle, Cambridge, and British psychoanalytic practice in a lively and unusual way.
1 Audiobook
The Misuse of Mind
by Karin Stephen
About the author
Born Catherine Elizabeth Costelloe in Westminster on March 10, 1889, she became known as Karin Stephen after her marriage to Adrian Stephen. She came from a strikingly intellectual family and was part of the wider Bloomsbury world, which placed her close to some of the most influential writers and thinkers of her time.
Her early academic work was in philosophy, and she studied at Bryn Mawr and later at Cambridge. In time she turned toward psychology and psychoanalysis, trained in the Freudian tradition, and went into private practice as a psychoanalyst. She is especially remembered for giving the first course of lectures on psychoanalysis at Cambridge, later shaping that material into a book for medical students.
Karin Stephen died on December 12, 1953. Today she is remembered both for her clinical and teaching work in British psychoanalysis and for the unusual path she took from philosophy to psychoanalysis, bringing clarity and seriousness to a field that was still very new.