About the " Psycho-suiciders"   

Karen & Adrian Stephen  Eugenie Sokolnicka  Sophie Morgenstern  Istvan Hollos   Sabina Spielrein              Viktor Tausk     Otto Gross   Wilhelm Stekel    Paul Federn  Bruno Bettelheim   Masud Khan   Max Kahane   Herbert Silberer   Monroe Meyer    Martin Peck       Karl Schroetter   Johann Honegger   Edward Bibring  Karl Landauer  Clara Happel  Horace Frink

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Background music: Tachanka [Tachanka] music: K. Listov, lyrics: M. Ruderman; 1936

  About the Psychosuiciders

<Outre Federn, Stekel, Tausk et Silberer, on trouve d'autres suicidés parmi les analystes du premier groupe Karin Stephen, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Tatiana Rosenthal, Kan Schrötter, Monroe Meyer, Martin Peck, Max Kahane, Johann Honegger. (...) Il n'en demeure pas moins troublant que ces premiers analystes se soient si souvent donné la mort, lorsqu'il ne leur arrivait pas d'autres malheurs.>> (Paul Roazen, "Freud and his followers", version française, 1974, New York, Knopf)

 

 

 

                 

Photo: a portrait of Adrian Stephen

 

 
 

 

 About T. Rosenthal's biography  

 

About T. Rosenthal's essays

 

Paul Federn
Herbert Silberer
 
 
 
 
 
   Sabine Spielrein

 

 

    assepsi@virgilio.it  

  Masud Khan

 

 Viktor Tausk
 
  Photo: Bruno Bettelheim

 

   Adrian & Karin Stephen

Photo: Wilhelm Stekel

 

 

 

The Stephens:
Adrian (1889-1948)

and Karin (1889-1953)

(source: "Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis. An

 Exhibition of Documents from the Archives of

the British Psychoanalytical Society", compiled

by Polly Rossdale and Ken Robinson)

 

Excerpt:

 

<<In Adrian Stephen, Bloomsbury and psychoanalysis met. He was born in 1883 into
an erudite and cultured background, the brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. As a student at Cambridge his sense of mischief and fun manifested itself in what became known as the Zanzibar Hoax. The Sultan of Zanzibar was visiting England and Adrian and his friends decided to dress up and impersonate the Sultan’s uncle (fearing that if they impersonated the Sultan himself they would be recognised and exposed).

They travelled to London, equipped themselves at a theatrical costumiers, sent a telegram to the Mayor of Cambridge informing him of the Sultan’s uncle’s imminent arrival. On returning to Cambridge, the hoaxers were escorted around the town and principal colleges on a grand tour.
The story was later leaked to The Daily Mail but they had got away with it.

They did not lose their taste for practical jokes. A few years later Adrian encouraged his sister Virginia and Duncan Grant to take part in another similar exploit, this time dressing up as the Emperor of Abyssina and his retinue. They informed the admiralty that the Emperor wished to visit the Channel Fleet of the British Navy and its flag ship the ‘Dreadnought’. They were received with the dignity and ceremony appropriate to their apparent standing. They talked in a mixture of Swahili and an invented language and Adrian acted as the group’s interpreter. Again their hoax was later revealed but the Navy were keen to keep scandal under wraps. It was not until much later when he was well established as an analyst that Adrian wrote up their exploits as The Dreadnought Hoax which was published in 1936 by Hogarth Press.
In 1907, Adrian was called to the bar at
Lincoln’s Inn and, in 1914, he married Karin
Costelloe, a fellow of Newnham College,
Cambridge, a niece by marriage and pupil of
Bertrand Russell. She was the most gifted woman philosophy student in Cambridge of her time.
In 1912, she had been elected to the Aristotelian Society and published a book on Bergson. When war broke out both Adrian and Karin (like Lytton and James Strachey and Leonard Woolf) became conscientious objectors. Amongst the manuscripts of the Stephens in the possession of the Archives there is one written by Karin ‘On Pacificism’. They spent the First World War working on a farm in Essex.It was after the war that they both became
interested in training as psychoanalysts. In the inter-war period Ernest Jones was eager that those interested in psychoanalysis should have medical qualifications, and they duly trained as doctors. They both went into analysis with James Glover, until his untimely death in 1925 when Adrian went to Ella Sharpe and Karin to Sylvia Payne. They were accepted as Associate Members in 1927 and became full members in 1930/1.

During the Second World War, Adrian was
so angered by the anti-semitism that had pushed the Freuds and many others out of their homes that he abandoned his pacifist stance and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as an army psychiatrist. Amongst the Stephen manuscripts is a paper by Adrian entitled simply ‘Anti-Semitism’. John Bowlby has left a memorable pen-picture of Adrian in this period. In May 1942, he was posted to the military hospital at Northfield, Birmingham where Rickman and Bion were working. Karin joined up as a driver in the Queen’s Messenger Flying Squad Food Convoy. During and after the war, Adrian drew on his legal training to take a lead in the constitutional reform of the British Society.
Karin suffered from manic-depression and from increasingly-severe deafness. Leonard Woolf tried to her help her through a particularly low period in the 1940s by encouraging her to write a biography of Freud. She finally committed suicide>>.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Documents from BPS archives :

8. Adrian Stephen as a boy in sailor uniform

 

9. Karin Stephen dressed as a Quaker. Karin

like Adrian loved fancy dress but she also

had Quaker origins

 

10. The Zanzibar Hoax

 

11. The Dreadnought Hoax

 

12. Daily Mirror cartoon showing the

Dreadnought Hoax

 

13. Karin Stephen, Adrian Stephen and their

daughter Anne, Chilling, 1919

 

14. Adrian and Karin Stephen and Virginia

Woolf

 

15. Adrian Stephen with pigs in Loom Lane

during his service as a conscientious

objector in 1917

 

16. King’s Head which Karin first rented in

1924 and bought in 1932. It stands on

the Handford Water near Harwich on the

Essex coast

 

17. Adrian Stephen in military uniform

 

18. An excerpt from Karin Stephen’s 1927 diary

recording her life on return home from a trip

to the USA. (KS/03)

 

 

19. Letter from Adrian Stephen to Sylvia Payne, 21 January 1937, proposing an item for the British Psychoanalytical Society board-meeting agenda: ‘To consider the principles

guiding the training committee in their

selection of candidates with special

reference to the need or otherwise of

requiring medical qualification’.

(G01/BB/F01/02C)

 

20. Letters from Adrian and Karin Stephen to

Edward Glover, 9 June 1939, setting out

their qualifications and experience for

practice in the emergency of war.

(CSB/F16/01 and 02)

 

21. Letter from Adrian Stephen to Sylvia Payne, 6 July 1939, about a proposal that the rules of the British Psychoanalytical Society be made public to members. (CSB/F16/03)

 

22. Extract from John Bowlby’s 1985 typescript ‘Memories of BPAS Analysts’, giving his penportraits of the Stephens. (CBC/F09/06)

 

23. Psychoanalytic papers by the Stephens

‘They were … "Bloomsbury", a badge they wore with a pride equal to that with which they called themselves psychoanalysts.’
 

[Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick in The letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-25, (1986)].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Virginia and Adrian Stephen
playing cricket, c.1886
 
Photo: portrait of Adrian Stephen by Ray (Rachel) Strachey (late 1920s or early 1930s)
Photo: portrait of Adrian Stephen by Ray (Rachel) Strachey (late 1920s or early 1930s)
Photo: portrait of Adrian Stephen by Ray (Rachel) Strachey (late 1920s or early 1930s)
Biography of Adrian Stephen:

Jean MacGibbon, <<There's the Lighthouse: Biography of Adrian Stephen >>,  James & James, 1997,  200 pages, ISBN 0907383769.

Photo: Julia Stephen with Adrian Stephen
and Henry James at Talland House, 1894

 
Photo: Adrian Stephen
Photo: Virginia Woolf
Karin Stephen Costelloe (1889-1953) was the daughter of Frank Costelloe, a Catholic of Irish ancestry, and Mary  Smith. Soon after Karin's birth, the Costelloe marriage did not thrive, and Mary married Bernard Berenson, while Karis and her sister, Ray, lived with  father. About the history of Karin's parents, we mention P. Maier's review of Barbara Strachey's book "Remarkable Relations. The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women" (N.Y., Universe Books). The review was published in New York Times, on July, 8, 2008.

 

<<WHAT was so remarkable about Barbara Strachey's relations, the Pearsall Smith women of Philadelphia and London? They were members of a family of writers yet produced no published works of enduring importance. They did manage to know a startling number of celebrated people; Walt Whitman, Henry and William James, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, even Woodrow Wilson find a way into their story. Mary Pearsall Smith played a critical role in the early career of her second husband, Bernard Berenson. Her sister, Alys, was the first wife of Bertrand Russell. Unfortunately, she seems mostly to have bored him.

None of this, however, sustains Barbara Strachey's claim that her maternal ancestors had a ''disproportionately strong'' impact, ''like a burst of shrapnel,'' on the worlds they inhabited. What impact they had -and it was real, though private - came from what they were together: a clan of fiercely and at times comically independent women, thoroughly convinced of the value and even superiority of their sex, who held to each other with extraordinary strength and endurance. When physically apart, they wrote each other daily letters, and they persisted in that habit with few breaks over three generations, from the mid-19th century until World War II. Miss Strachey, who is Mary Berenson's granddaughter, inherited more than 20,000 Pearsall Smith letters, along with diaries, unpublished biographies and autobiographies, scrapbooks, photographs and other family memorabilia, which provide the basis for this fascinating and profoundly humane book.

The story begins with Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911), the matriarch of a family that really was a matriarchy. Hannah dominated her family, and she dominates Miss Strachey's book. As the narrative moves past Hannah's lifetime and focuses on her granddaughters and great-granddaughters, it becomes compressed, even hasty, as if it were the obligatory conclusion of an exercise whose greatest interest for the writer lay in its beginning. Hannah's beginnings in turn lay in the religious convictions of her parents, both strict Philadelphia Quakers. Men and women were equal before the Quakers' God. Quaker preachers were drawn from both sexes, and a Quaker woman's word carried authority when founded on her ''inner light.'' Hannah and Robert Pearsall Smith, the fellow Quaker she married in 1851, left their ancestral religion for the ''heresy'' of evangelicalism. Nonetheless, Quaker attitudes toward women, like the use of ''thee'' and ''thou,'' persisted in the family until well into the 20th century.

Hannah expected, with Robert's agreement, to continue her education after their marriage, not to become immediately mired in domestic responsibilities. But babies soon began to arrive, and with them an antagonism toward their father that intensified in later years. ''I think marriage is a frightful risk,'' Hannah once confessed; ''and I do not like men.'' The children themselves, especially her girls, were, however, compensation. ''Daughters are wonderful luxuries,'' she said in old age; ''they are well worth a bad husband, at least mine are.'' To those daughters she offered unstinting support. ''I love thee, my precious, with an untellable mother love ... whatever happens,'' she wrote her daughter Mary. ''Moreover I am on thy side against the whole world ... for thy side is my side always.'' Mary rebelled against tradition and convention: She married a Catholic of Irish ancestry, Frank Costelloe, adopted his religion and went to live with him in England. But rebellion never took her far from her mother. Hannah was there to help the newlyweds settle into their new home, to witness the birth of their children, Rachel (Ray) and Karin, to whisk Mary off to the country when the pressures of family life strained her strength and stability. Indeed, within a few years the entire Pearsall Smith family moved to London and took a house at 44 Grosvenor Road, a few doors from the Costelloes. Unfortunately, the Costelloe marriage did not thrive. Within a few years Mary ran off to travel through Italy with Berenson, learning from him and joining in his studies of Renaissance art. Hannah took care of her tiny granddaughters.

A FEMALE alliance so powerful, so self-enclosed, had an impact on others that was not always for the good. After all, few people welcome ''bursts of shrapnel'' in their lives. Among the casualties was Hannah's husband, Robert. A generous man of ''warm affections, moved far more by emotions than by intellect,'' he fit female stereotypes far more than his hardheaded wife did. And he fumbled his way through life. His greatest talent was for religious work, but his career there foundered after he demonstrated Christ's role as ''bridegroom'' to a female disciple with too much literalness. Always he seems to have sought warmth and sympathy, but, as his daughter Mary observed, he ''did not win much love in this life, and what he won he couldn't keep.''

Hannah's son Logan, a writer, may have been another casualty. Girls often have been raised by parents who prefer boys. Hannah, however, not only found girls more personally satisfying than boys but ''felt in her heart ... that a boy could never be as valuable and interesting a human being as a girl.'' Logan proved willing to repeat an equally harsh judgment on his female relatives. ''The husband of a niece of mine once told me,'' he reported, ''that after his marriage he found that his wife was an Ogress, was the daughter and granddaughter of Ogresses, and had become the mother of a fourth of the species.''

Hannah's sons-in-law disliked her as much as their wives loved her. Berenson found Hannah crude and uncultured. Bertie Russell considered her cruel and dishonest, even one of the wickedest women alive. As his wife, Alys, grew more like her mother, he found her increasingly unbearable. Finally, in 1911, after more than 16 years of marriage, he abandoned her. Alys never remarried but kept hoping, until she died 40 years later, that Russell would return to her. Meanwhile she occupied herself by caring for Logan and her sister's grandchildren.

Not only men suffered from the wiles of the matriarchy. Karin Costelloe, Mary Berenson's second child, was excluded from the inner circle of Pearsall Smith women. Her mother admitted that ''none of us love her as we do Ray,'' Karin's older sister. The reason was ''physiological - she resembles her father and his relatives, while Ray belongs almost exclusively to our side.'' Deprived of maternal affection as a child, Karin herself became a cold and neglectful mother. She was, however, also one of the most accomplished women in the family. Despite the handicap of deafness, she completed medical school and became a pioneer of British psychoanalysis, lecturing for years at Cambridge with great success. Like Ray, who married Lytton Strachey's brother, Oliver, Karin and her husband, Adrian Stephen, were for a time part of Bloomsbury (or ''Gloomsbury,'' as Mary Berenson called it). But not all members of that self-satisfied, ingrown circle appreciated Karin or her family. ''A good cob of a woman,'' Virginia Woolf (Karin's sister-in-law) said of her, ''but so hearty and without shade or softness. Age will harden her ... and her family will coarsen her.''

WHY did the Pearsall Smith women cling to each other so tenaciously and for so long? Almost all of Hannah's letters, Miss Strachey says, were ''returned and preserved.'' Obviously, they were not meant for the moment. Did the women see themselves as creating through their correspondence some great testament for posterity?

The function of the close relationship in the women's immediate lives is easier to understand. It was one way - one of a very few - that a woman could marry and ''still be myself,'' as Alys told Russell she wanted to do. In the same way, by writing her mother often, by insisting on annual summer trips to England despite Berenson's protests at her absence (as by her various love affairs), Mary Berenson made clear that she was more than an extension of her husband. She had an identity of her own: She was a Pearsall Smith woman.

MARY'S daughters, Ray and Karin, wrote less, Miss Strachey says, because their ''husbands could not be persuaded that letter writing was a desirable occupation.'' But husbands never seem to have had much to say about the doings of the Pearsall Smith women. Could it be that they wrote less because they needed the family connection less? Hannah and Alys found much to do for their religion, for the cause of women, for the temperance movement, and Mary shared in Berenson's career. But it was only in Ray's and Karin's generation that the women were allowed regular careers of their own. Perhaps Ray found identity enough in political work and Karin enough in psychoanalysis that they no longer were, or needed to be, Pearsall Smith women first and foremost.

One family is not all families, and the Pearsall Smith women were blessedly unrepresentative of women in general in the eras in which they lived. Their persistent commitment to each other and to their sex was in a way heroic, a strategy of survival in difficult times. But the plight of Robert and Logan Pearsall Smith suggest that the changes wrought by women's liberation have not been confined to women. The opening of opportunities for women has not, of course, resolved the problems or removed the dangers of family life. But by allowing women to escape the private sphere and freeing them from each other, it has done some good for everyone>>.

About Karin Stephen Costelloe one can read the following lines written by Robert Hinshelwood

(source: Robert Hinshelwood, <<Psychoanalysis in Britain: Points of Cultural Access, 1893-1918>>, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 76: 135-151)

Excerpt (page 146):

<<Costello, a niece of Bertrand Russell, had shown early promise. She was regarded as one of Russell’s brightest students, and was described as ‘surely the best of the Bergsonians’ (Broad, 1916, p. 270) as a result of a series of papers between 1914 and 1918.
In 1914, Costello married Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother, and her interests moved from the Bergsonian study of vital urges to psychoanalysis—perhaps not a very long conceptual journey. In 1920, on Ernest Jones’s recommendation, both she and her husband enrolled at medical school, preparatory to becoming psychoanalysts. She remained an analyst, practising without much distinction, failing to realise her early promise, until her death in 1958—by suicide (Roazen, 1984). In part, her reasons for turning to psychoanalysis may have been to do with her own difficult personality, and her unhappy childhood and relationship with her mother (Strachey & Samuels, 1983)>>.

Notes:

Broad, C. D. (1916). Conference review of the proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1914-5. Mind, 25:270-272.

Roazen, P. (1984). Freud and his Followers. New York: New York Univ. Press.

 

Strachey, B. & Samuels, J. (eds) (1983). Mary Berenson: A Self-Portraint from her Letters and Diaries. London: Gollanz.

Photo: a portrait of Karin Stephen by Ray (Rachel) Strachey

  Karin Stephen  Costelloe (1889-1953)

(source: "Psychoanalytikerinnen in Europa. Biographisches Lexicon", 2008.

<<Karin Stephen war die jüngste Tochter von Frank Costelloe, einem zum Katholizismus übergetretenen Nordiren, und Mary Pearsall Smith, die aus einer Quäkerfamilie in Philadelphia stammte. Ihre Mutter verließ ihren Mann wegen Bernard Berenson, und als Karin zehn war starb ihr Vater, so dass sie und ihre Schwester Ray bei ihrer Quäker-Großmutter aufwuchsen. Beide besuchten das Newnham College für Frauen in Cambridge, wo Karin Costelloe die Schülerin ihres Onkels Bertrand Russel und des Philosophen George Edward Moore war. 1912 wurde sie in die Aristotelian Society aufgenommen und schrieb ihr Buch The Misuse of Mind über den Philosophen Henri Bergson.
Sie schloss sich dem Bloomsbury-Kreis an und heiratete 1914 Adrian Stephen (1883-1948), den jüngeren Bruder von Virginia Woolf. 1915 und 1918 wurden ihre beiden Töchter Ann und Judith geboren. Die mit sozialistischen Ideen sympathisierende Karin Stephen und ihr Mann waren Kriegsgegner und arbeiteten während des Ersten Weltkriegs auf einer Farm in Essex. Nach dem Krieg begannen beide eine Analyse bei James Glover und absolvierten auf Anraten von Ernest Jones ein Medizinstudium. Als Glover 1926 starb, beendete Karin Stephen ihre Lehranalyse bei Sylvia Payne und wurde 1927 außerordentliches, 1931 ordentliches Mitglied der British Psycho-Analytical Society. 1927 ging sie für eine Zeit nach Baltimore, wo sie bei Clara Thompson in Analyse war. In der Freud-Klein-Kontroverse der 1940er Jahre gehörten Karin und Adrian Stephen zur Middle Group der Unabhängigen.
Karin Stephen lag besonders die Vermittlung psychoanalytischen Wissens an Nicht-Analytiker am Herzen. Sie hielt die erste öffentliche Vortragsreihe über Psychoanalyse in Cambridge, eine sehr gerühmte Einführung für Medizinstudenten, die 1933 unter dem Titel Psychoanalysis and Medicine als Buch erschien.

Neben ihrer Vortragstätigkeit veröffentlichte sie Rezensionen und Artikel zu psychoanalytischen Themen. Beispielsweise vertrat sie in einem Aufsatz über Relations between the superego and the ego die Ansicht, dass das Über-Ich als mahnende und strafende Instanz ein pathologisches Phänomen sei, während normalerweise die Funktion der Selbstkontrolle vom Ich ausgeübt werde.
Schon seit ihrem Studium litt Karin Stephen unter Schwerhörigkeit und musste ein Hörrohr benutzen, nach einer Operation kam eine partielle Gesichtslähmung hinzu. Sie hatte immer wieder mit Depressionen zu kämpfen und beging schließlich Selbstmord>>.

Schriften
[Ausführliche Bibliografie in Milner 1954, 433-434]
-The Misuse of Mind. A Study of Bergson's Attack on Intellctualism. London 1922
-Pain, love and fear. Psychoanal Rev 17, 1930, 126-139
-Psychoanalysis and Medicine. A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill. Cambridge 1933
-Introjection and projection. Guilt and rage. Brit J Med Psychol 14, 1934, 316-331
-The development of infantile anxiety in relation to frustration, aggression and fear. Journal of Mental Science Nr. 84, 1938, 1068
-Aggression in early childhood. Brit J Med Psychol 18, 1939, 178-190
-Relations between the superego and the ego (1945). Psychoanal Hist 2 (1), 2000, 11-28
-Discussion on the treatment of obsessional neurosis. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 43, 1950, 1002-1007

Quellen
-King, Pearl, und Riccardo Steiner (Hg.): The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45. London, New York 1991
-Lee, Hermione: Virginia Woolf. Ein Leben (1996). Frankfurt/M. 1999
-Milner, Marion: Obituary Karin Stephen (1889-1953). IJP 35, 1954, 432-434

 

 
 
 

        

 

Last modified:  Jul. 12, 2008

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