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Petteri Pietikainen, who presented his thesis, C.G. Jung and the Psychology of Symbolic Forms, at the University of Helsinki in 1999, has published a new book — this time, in English: Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden. It deals with the development of a society that became increasingly characterized by a psychological way of thinking. He investigates the period spanning from 1890 to 1950. Pietikainen shows how the concept of neurosis became what is known as a ‘contagious diagnosis’, and how the process caused terminology like discontent and stress to be adopted into modern everyday language, and that this process is linked to the development of the concept of neurosis.
According to Pietikainen, over the course of these six decades, Sweden gradually evolved into a country marked by the notions of neurosis and nervousness. He also shows how diagnoses like hysteria, neurasthenia and psychoneurosis spread from upper-middle-class women to other parts of the population. The author also claims that, by around 1950 or so, the entire Swedish society was dominated by what he calls a medico-cultural ‘virus’ of neurosis.
The material in this book is divided into three sections, all of which are interrelated. The first chapter of the first section of the book is an introduction to the ‘Swedish path to modernity’. Next, the author continues with the early history of neurosis in Sweden, and analyses the Serafimer Hospital's Neurological Polyclinic, which is located on the outskirts of Stockholm. The third chapter examines aspects of health ideology.