You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One interesting phenomenon of recent years has been the burgeoning interest in applying a psychoanalytic mode of thinking to enhance the understanding of literary texts and the readers responses to them. In addition, psychoanalytic reasoning is used to explore various aspects of the author's personality and his biographical life history. It is a difficult task to write a psychoanalytic conceptualization in order to give a balanced expression of the subject's inner experience and of the significant external circumstances of his life history. Psychoanalytic theory does not make this easy for the biographer, as the specialized language of psychoanalysis is difficult to master. From this point of view, the biographer should ideally be a psychoanalyst himself. Carl-Erik Brattemo meets these requirements. As a psychoanalyst and a professor in applied psychology, he has written a book about the Swedish author Sven Lidman (1882–1960).
This author was for many years well-known in Sweden before he became a pentecostal preacher. Brattemo's study investigates how Lidman, after being expelled in 1948 from the Philadelphia pentecostal congregation in Stockholm, attempted to master his life problems reinforced by the expulsion, in a series of autobiographical works where he sought to solve his dilemmas. Brattemo's study is based on Lidman's autobiographical books and on Ibsen's drama, Peer Gynt. He uses Peer Gynt as a background model for the moulding and mastering of similar life problems.
In order to elucidate the life and the destiny of the author, Brattemo emphasizes the deep narcissistic disturbances in Lidman's personality. However, his narcissism became a source of painful conflicts, but served also as a spear to creativity in his life and work. Brattemo's investigation contains a wealth of scholarly knowledge of relevant psychonalytic theories of the self and of narcissism. Those interested in problems of literary psychology will find in this study several theoretical vie