Carl-Erik Brattemo 1926-2003

In the autumn of 1975, I got to know Carl-Erik Brattemo as we started our training to become psychoanalysts at The Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute. We were 12 disciples (sic), most of us in our early thirties. Carl-Erik was a little older. I had met him briefl y some five years earlier when he was in charge of the Psychology Department in the Sundsvall Psychiatric Hospital - Sundsvall in north-eastern Sweden was my home town as well as his - and the Department hosted that year's meeting of the Swedish Psychiatric Association.

At the conference, a rather stormy session on milieutherapy took place. Demands were made for, at the time and place, new and radical psychodynamic ways of thinking and working in psychiatry, with intense resistance from the psychiatric establishment, the academic part of it not the least. Yngvar Löchen from Norway was an invited speaker; his book on ideals and realities in psychiatric work had just been published in Sweden and caused much debate. When leaving the conference hall for a break, I remember that Löchen turned to CarlErik saying: “I had no idea of this total eclipse within Swedish psychiatry”.

When we started our seminars at the Psychoanalytic Institute, Carl-Erik was already a Professor of Psychology at Uppsala University. This was something exceptional. How many full professors start a lengthy educational training lasting several years to become a psychoanalyst? Carl-Erik was indeed also one of the first in our group to graduate and become a member of the Swedish Society.

During those seminal years, Carl-Erik became more to me than simply a fellow student. Once every month, we spent four hours together on the train to Sundsvall on Friday afternoons and four hours back to Stockholm on Sundays. He travelled there to be with his family, I did so to visit my children after a trying divorce. CarlErik's steady calmness soothed my nerves and infused feelings of trust and confidence.

On the train, we often discussed the content of yesterday'