Spouse Adrian Stephen & Karin Stephen
Karin Costelloe-Stephen
* March 10, 1889
† December 12, 1953
Though Catherine Elizabeth (‘Karin’) Stephen née Pearsall Conn Costelloe is better known for her significant later contributions to the history of psychoanalysis, her academic career began in philosophy. She was the first woman to be awarded a ‘Star’ or Distinction in the Moral Science Tripos in 1911, after which she joined the Aristotelian Society in 1912. From then onwards, she developed her philosophical views in a series of papers, culminating in her 1922 book The Misuse of Mind. Although she presents her work primarily as defending a Bergsonian outlook against Russell’s attacks, she developed a series of original views of e.g. mereology, change, abstraction, knowledge by acquaintance, and language. She was part of the Bloomsbury group, and her account of knowledge by acquaintance may have influenced the conception of the stream of consciousness developed by Virginia Woolf (see Vrahimis 2022, 36), while her distinction between complexity and synthesis had an influence on Roger Fry’s analyses of impressionist art (see de Mille 2024). She abandoned philosophy during the 1920s, turning to psychoanalysis together with her husband Adrian Stephen (Woolf’s and Vanessa Bell’s brother). She lectured on psychoanalysis in Cambridge during the 1930s, and wrote numerous works on the topic, which she also connected to her political activism against authoritarianism (see Sayers & Tyson 2024).
Dr. Andreas Vrahimis
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