Anne-Marie Auestad 1931-2002

Anne-Marie Auestad's death was sudden and unexpected to those of us who were close to her. When she died, she had a rich and manifold professional life behind her, as psychoanalyst, child psychiatrist, child psychotherapist, child psychoanalyst, supervisor and teacher. For almost 30 years, she was the director of Mentalhygienisk Rådgivningskontor, which, along with her coworkers, she developed into a unique child psychiatry out-patients' clinic, founded on a psychoanalytic, object-relational understanding. In 1990, she was a driving force behind the creation of The Norwegian Association for Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents, intended to develop child therapeutic competence and to offer post-graduate education within the field of child psychiatry. Through her extensive work as supervisor and teacher, she had an invaluable impact on the development of psychoanalytical child therapy and on the education of child therapists.

Anne-Marie qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1979 and practised privately full-time for the last ten years of her life. She was part of a pioneering group within The Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society, which set up a child psychoanalyst training and education in 1980, and she became one of the first child analysts to qualify in Norway. AnneMarie functioned as training analyst, child analyst, supervisor and teacher, and was actively engaged in the life of the Society until she was struck by illness.

The mental health of the child was the centre of Anne-Marie's attention. Her work focussed on giving the child a voice and understanding him on his own premises. As psychoanalyst and child analyst, she was concerned with the importance of the early attachment between mother and child and its influence on the child's personality development as well as on the psychic health of the adult. It was important to Anne-Marie to let psychoanalytical knowledge of children's fundamental emotional needs come to the advantage of society. In the s