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To celebrate the birthdays of distinguished colleagues by publishing a book to honour them is a beautiful feat; it is a present which can be enjoyed by many. Veikko Tähkä and Tor-Björn Hägglund received their books, and now we can enjoy this creative work with Vilja Hägglund. Besides the bibliography of Vilja Hägglund, this book contains three articles portraying her personality and scientific interests, with the main part comprising eleven psychoanalytic articles by Finnish and international friends of the celebrant.
The personality of Vilja Hägglund as well as her main scientific works are well described. She has studied and written about female sexuality, the genital inner space and motherhood. The generosity of a good mother is also the personal experience of her colleagues, pupils and supervisees, as described in the articles. The psychoanalytic interpretation of Finnish fairy tales and folklore has been one of the topics of her interest, and even a book about cats is among her literary productions. The fruits of her work are not only literary; together with Tor-Björn Hägglund, she has introduced psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the North of Finland, where a second generation of psychoanalysts is active today. This book is also a proof of the vitality of the Monasteri Foundation for Psychotherapy, a foundation organized and run by Vilja Hägglund and her pupils in Oulu.
The scientific part of the book is not, strictly speaking, confined to one topic: each contributor has written his or her own article separately. The title and a leading theme of the book is creativity in psychoanalysis, and creativity in a wide sense is touched upon in several of the articles. Creativity is introduced by Tor-Björn Hägglund in his study “Creativity in Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Creativity”. His starting point is the early mother-child relation much in the spirit of Winnicott. Hägglund elaborates his thoughts on fiction in psychoanalysis, fiction i