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Bengt Naumann, friend and colleague of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society, psychoanalyst and neurologist with an unusually wide field of activity, has died, 1 December 1998 in Stockholm at the age of 76.
He was born in Stora Tuna, Dalarna, and grew up in Örnsköldsvik in the north of Sweden. He did his medical training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and took his medical degree in 1948. During the fifties, he specialized at different medical clinics in neurology, internal medicine and psychiatry and at the legendary Mentalvårdsbyrån (present name Psykoterapiinstitutet), and obtained his speciality as a neurologist.
In the early fifties, Bengt went into psychoanalysis with Lajos Székely and later Nils Haak. This was a decisive experience in his life, which resulted in his decision to go into psychoanalytic training. There we met in the seminars. It was a time of an analytic pioneering spirit, one that we shared with our Finnish comrades making their long training in our country: during the years Nousiainen, Ikonen, Tähkä, Lesche, Rechardt, Enckell, and others.
In a charming article in the Bulletin (2/1995) of the Swedish Society, Bengt described his later seminar group, where all the other members happened to be psychologists. He very much enjoyed being confronted with their humanistic frame of mind and way of studying. With his typical humour, he referred to their writings in different psychoanalytic subjects as distinct from his own, that he found less impressive: “I myself made an investigation for Parliament into ‘Injurious effects of the sport of boxing’.” (It should be mentioned that this investigation contributed to the banning of professional boxing in Sweden, despite extremely strong protests.) Sadly, he wrote that at that time, 1995, nearly all of these friends had passed away.