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This very interesting book was written by a Danish psychoanalyst who graduated from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Its style has a certain charm and quaintness, and it is sprinkled with quotations from the Danish intellectual culture and religious milieu, most notably involving Kierkegaard, who, like the patient, suffered greatly in his relationship with his father. This mixture of scholarship and easy access give the book a similarity to Freud's written case histories, a similarity I suspect is no accident and makes for pleasant literary reading.
The patient was a 44-year-old physician who suffered all his life from classical panic attacks that became acute and frequent shortly before his consultation with Dr. Vanggaard. In the few months preceding the treatment, the patient was treated by a general practitioner with meprobamate for sleep and with chlorpromazine, which did not help his condition. At the end of the book, the patient himself writes, 17 years after the treatment, that the analyst had instructed him to take no psychopharmacologic drugs except meprobamate for sleep; as a physician, the patient found this a difficult requirement, but “I at once made up my mind to obey” (p. 114).
The treatment began September 16, 1969, and was carried out, with the patient using the couch, three times weekly for five and a half months and then with sporadic sessions spread out over the next six months. Both the patient and the analyst claimed a cure, which lasted for 16 years, raising the issue of the appropriate treatment for a panic disorder, which these days would most likely be treated neither with chlorpromazine nor with a five-and-a-half month “psychoanalysis.”