Lives of the First World War

Adrian Stephen (1883–1948) was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an author and psychoanalyst, and the younger brother of Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He and his wife became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud, and were among the first British psychoanalysts. On the introduction of conscription in 1916 during the First World War Stephen became a conscientious objector, like many other members of the Bloomsbury Group, lived out the remainder of the war working on a farm in Essex. Early in the war he was active in the Union of Democratic Control, then later was Honorary Treasurer of the National Council Against Conscription. Towards the end of the war he and his wife became interested in psychoanalysis and trained medical- they qualified in the late 1920s. In World War II Stephen became so angered by the Nazis' brutality and anti-semitism that he abandoned his pacifist stance and volunteered to become an army psychiatrist at the outbreak of war in 1939, at the age of 57. He died in 1948.

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