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The Norwegian psychiatrist and analyst Jarl Jørstad has written a book where he most generously shares experiences from his personal and professional life. As a motif for his writing, the author has chosen the story from The Odyssey about Scilla and Charybids. The title reflects his concern about questions of balances on different levels of personal and collective life, where too much or too little of anything always has difficult consequences. Not primarily intended for students or for colleagues in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the book nevertheless has a significant relevance for both groups as well as for the general public. A wide range of psychological issues are discussed and the author, always in a low-key tone, demonstrates how psychoanalytic thinking can be helpful for our understanding in many fields of personal and social life. The book consists of a number of essays about different issues, woven together by the author's personal reflections.
Using his own experiences of isolation, anxiety and loss during imprisonment in Norway and later in Polish and German concentration-camps, amongst others Buchenwald, the author discusses the consequences of loss and the prerequisites of conditions for survival as well as for becoming one of the executioners. As a reader, one gets the impression that these terrible early experiences of the most utterly destructive in human life, but also of hope, humanism and courage, not only have deeply affected the choice of profession and career, but have also contributed to the formation of a moral integrity, an absence of prejudice and to a capacity to think about conflictual and ambiguous questions that are demonstrated in the book. His early experiences, of the values of group-identity, groupmorale and moral leadership for his own and his Norwegian comrade's survival, also seem to have remained an inspiring factor for his later interest and multifaceted activities in the field of analytically oriented groupwork.
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