Karin Stephen (née Costelloe) (1890–1953) was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist.
Karin Stephen was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she became a Fellow. She married Adrian Stephen shortly before World War I; the couple, as conscientious objectors, spent the war working on a dairy farm. After the war, the couple trained as doctors and then went into analysis with James Glover; when he died in 1926, Karin continued with Sylvia Payne. Accepted as an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1927, she became a full member in 1931.[1]
Stephen entered private practice as a psychoanalyst. She gave the first lecture course on psychoanalysis ever given at Cambridge University: the course of six lectures was repeated over several years, and formed the basis of her medical textbook Psychoanalysis and medicine.[2] She suffered from deafness and manic depression. After her husband died in 1948, her health deteriorated and she committed suicide in 1953.[1]
Her papers are held in the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society.[3]