Obituaries

Stefi Pedersen

Stefi Pedersen M. A., member of the Swedish Psycho-Analytical Society, well-known figure in cultural circles and an indefatigable defender of the concept of the individual, died on March 24, 1980 after a week-long illness. She was a small, slender woman, physically delicate but with an unusual amount of spiritual strength and charm.

She was born in 1908, grew up in Berlin but realised early the direction political events in Germany were to take, and moved to Oslo in 1933. Ten years later she fled to Sweden with a group of Jewish children. She retained her Norwegian nationality which provided her with a fixed point in her life and which at the same time was an expression of her deep attachment to that country.

In our Society she was known as an inspiring psychoanalyst, teacher and supervisor, and took part in a wide range of psychoanalytical activities in and outside Sweden. Her written work includes a large number of articles on psychoanalysis as well as the two collections of essays dealing with questions and issues raised by psychoanalysis and with the rights of the individual: Psycho-Analysis in Our Time, 1973, Bobs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis-N.Y., and Människa och ting (i.e. People and Thing), 1978, Wahlström & Widstrand. As a result of her constant questioning and probing, she was subjected to a certain amount of criticism, but anyone who was able to successfully follow the process of her thinking found a large and deeply integrated fund of knowledge on the theory and method of psychoanalysis.

As a psychoanalyst, Stefi Pedersen, to a certain extent, continued a Central-European tradition, i.a. by viewing psychoanalysis as a revolutionary movement far removed from the Establishment (which of course it was during the first decades of this century), and by considering art in its widest meaning to be a self-evident part of the work of a psychoanalyst in keeping in touch with our archaic roots.

I think of Stefi as a “bearer of the c