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Carl Lesche died on the 13th of December 1993, at the age of 73. His health had been frail for several years, but he did not seem to care much about it. He was active in his profession as a psychoanalyst until shortly before his death.
Maybe we ought to announce his “death” within quotation marks to pay respect to his personal view on the subject, which he recently presented in his paper On Death—Preliminary Communication (Scand. Psychoanal. Rev. 1992: 15: 131-149). The lapidary summary states: “The mundane person is born and dies. The body and soul perish. But the person's ego bears within it its transcendental Ego. The transcendental Ego is not born nor dies, it is an eternal being in the making”. According to Carl Lesche, who was inspired by Husserl and his followers, a destruction of what he calls man's transcendental Ego is philosophically unthinkable. It would take a sharp mind and a good command of philosophy to prove him wrong.
The fact that his body and soul are gone, however, evokes the need for a recapitulation of his “life” and of the range and imprint of his work.
Carl Lesche was born in Oulu, Finland. In the 1950s, he moved to Sweden in order to start his psychoanalytic training. He stayed in Stockholm for the rest of his life together with his family, his wife who died prematurely in 1976, and two daughters. Within the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society, he had been active for many years as a training analyst and a teacher, at the same time working full time as a psychoanalyst in private practice. Still, to Carl Lesche, psychoanalysis was only one sphere of