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.
Per Magnus Johansson (PMJ) defended his dissertation at the Department of History of Ideas and Science at the University of Göteborg in 1999. His dissertation consisted of an extensive investigation of Freudian psychoanalysis and the history of how psychoanalysis was established in Sweden, its reception, its pioneers and the history of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society. It was published in two volumes in the same year. This thorough and exhaustive work gained him an Associate Professorship.
PMJ is also a practicing psychoanalyst, trained in Paris in the Lacanian tradition, which makes him extraordinarily suitable for describing the history of psychoanalysis in Sweden, with a penetrating outlook both as an insider and as someone with a certain distance and particular perspective.
In Volume I, PMJ gives an excellent introduction to some of Freud's texts, where he shows the synergetic effect of Freud's life experiences with the development of psychoanalytic theory. He proceeds along similar lines when, in the following volumes, he presents Swedish psychoanalysts.
In Volume II, he presents three pre-war pioneers, Poul Bjerre, Emmanuel af Geijerstam and Per Henrik Törngren, all of them markedly ambivalent to the psychoanalytic theory that they helped introduce. Per Henrik Törngren was a talented and multifaceted person who skillfully defended psychoanalysis against its national and international critics in his book Striden om Freud [The fight about Freud], published in 1936 when he was only 28. When the Swedish-Finnish Psychoanalytic Society was founded in 1934, he was one of its first members. As time went by, he became more and more critical of psychoanalysis in his publications, and was excluded from the Society in 1951.
The post-war psychoanalysts whom he presents are thinkers with distinct differences: Lajos Szekely, Carl Lesche and Ola Andersson, the latter quite unknown among Swedish analysts, but internationally recognized as a celebrated researcher of Freud and p