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Esther Lamm died on 28 February 1989. She died unexpectedly during convalescence after her last operation and after several difficult years when she was prevented from participating actively in her many areas of interest. Indirectly, she remained equally engaged, not only in events within the psychoanalytical society, but also in the personal lives of her friends and colleagues.
She was born on 9 August 1913, in Stockholm, the daughter of the Professor of Literature, Martin Lamm and his wife Greta, née Wawrinsky. She obtained her medical degree in 1945, and became a member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society in 1950. Colourful and keen on debating, she participated in the meetings, as well as in the congresses of the IPA, when international contracts were re-established in 1949. There, she established numerous bonds of friendship, especially with English psychoanalysts belonging to the Kleinian school. As a consultant of several institutions, and as a leader of seminars and a supervisor of the institute, she exerted a stimulating influence, due to her frankness and her open-minded attitude to the contradictory strivings of the human mind. Nevertheless, she was most at ease in her analyst's chair and was active in private practice until her death.
Esther was an avid reader, not only of psychoanalytic literature, but above all of belles-letters with a predilection for lyrics. Listening to Esther reciting poems amounted to being transported to a world of dream and fantasy, to some extent in contrast to her powerful voice, intensifying according to the dramatic increase in content, waking echoes in her personal dramatic disposition.
The first of the two homes in which Esther was most deeply rooted was the one at ÖUstermalmsgatan where she finished her studies, started in private practice and, together with her second husband Rudolf Holmdahl,