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.
On Sunday, 3 August 1997, one of the members of the Finnish Psychoanalytic Society, the Lithuanian psychologist Virginijus Pocius, died in an accident. He was born on 8 December 1959 in Plunge. After graduating from Plunge High School, he began studying psychology in the Faculty of History at the University of Vilnius, graduating in 1983. The same year, he began working as a psychologist at the Psychoneurological Hospital in Vilnius where he founded Lithuania's first telephone psychological counselling service. He was among the founders of Vilnius's Psychotherapy Center, and served as its director since 1989. In 1990, he left to study psychoanalysis in Helsinki, and was the first of the group of Lithuanians studying in Helsinki to become a psychoanalyst and be accepted as a member of the Finnish Psychoanalytic Society and IPA. In the last couple of years, Pocius worked as a psychoanalyst in Helsinki and helped spread information about psychoanalysis in Lithuania.
In Lithuania, he was part of the small group who saw the importance of psychoanalysis and who understood the opportunities it opened up. He studied with a distinct sense of purpose and spread information about psychoanalysis both within specialist circles and within the Lithuanian society at large. Virginijus Pocius was gifted, hard-working, and purposeful. As a result of his own initiative and excellent organizational skills, the development of psychoanalysis in Lithuania has been exceptionally fast.
He leaves behind a wife and two children. His family, relatives, colleagues, and the whole psychoanalytic community have suffered a great loss.
A Virginijus Pocius Memorial Fund has been established in Helsinki to help support his children. In Lithuania, the teaching staff of the Nida