Adrian Stephen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adrian Stephen (1883-1948) was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an author and psychoanalyst, and the brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He and his wife became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud, and were among the first British psychoanalysts.

With Stephen the youngest of four children, their father's death in 1904 resulted in the four siblings moving to Bloomsbury , and their house there became the nucleus of the Bloomsbury group.

In 1914 he married Karin Costelloe, a philosophy graduate and expert on Bergson. At the outbreak of World War I both Stephen and Costelloe became conscientious objectors, like Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, and lived out the war working on a farm in Essex.

Following the war they became interested in psychoanalysis, training medically at the request of Ernest Jones and later with James Glover, and becoming qualified in the late 1920s.

In 1936, Stephen decided to recount in detail the Dreadnought Hoax which he had taken part in a quarter of a century earlier, completing an account published by Hogarth press.

With the onset of World War II , Stephen became so angered by the Nazis' brutality and anti-semitism that he abandoned his pacifist stance of the previous war and volunteered to become an army doctor and army officer in 1942, shortly after his sister Virginia's suicide, then joining up at the age of 60. He died in 1948.