Inspired in part by a paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy by the psychoanalyst Malcolm Pines, describing the Cambridge and Bloomsbury background of the psychoanalyst, Adrian Stephen, in this paper I draw on the writings of his older sister, Virginia Woolf, and on other data as means of highlighting and explaining aspects of his life and work. In particular, I discuss his rebellion
... [Show full abstract] against their father, Leslie Stephen; his subsequent rebellion against authority before and during the First World War; and his involvement in psychoanalysis and politics during his medical and psychoanalytic training in the 1920s. I go on to explain how his opposition to tyranny informed his approach to psychoanalysis as means of freeing patients from the control exerted over them by their phantasies. And I show how, during the Second World War, he resisted dominance by Ernest Jones and Edward Glover of the British Psycho‐Analytical Society, and how in his post‐war clinical work he extended Freud's moral version of the super‐ego into an account of it as a wish‐fulfilling agency of the mind.