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The book at hand is written by one of Denmark's most talented and acclaimed authors, Katrine Marie Guldager. The book is a description of her nine-year long psychoanalysis with an experienced psychoanalyst.
In the preface, Katrine Marie Guldager writes how in 1993, when she embarked on the analysis because of painful anxiety attacks, she was uninterested in the theoretical part of psychoanalysis; her only interest was “just to get better; does it work or doesn't it?” (p. 7). But when she started writing the book, she realised that it is almost impossible to describe an analysis without explaining some of the theory behind it. In chapter 1, she gives a brief account of central psychoanalytical concepts and more terms are added as the book progresses.
Chapter 1 begins with an ominous quotation from Dante's The divine comedy, which she compares with a journey to the most secret areas of the mind: “Perhaps psychoanalysis is in fact the soul journey of the modern world … when I started in psychoanalysis I also embarked upon an endless and painful pilgrimage through the circles of Hell, with my analyst as my Virgil” (p. 11).
Guldager was born in Denmark, but when she was two years old, her parents moved to Africa to work as technical advisors for Danida, a development agency under the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Guldager lived in Africa until she was almost six-years-old. During this time, she went to both Zambian kindergarten and attended school there; in both places discipline prevailed.
When the family returned to Denmark, it was in the wake of the youth revolt of the late 1960s. They moved into a so-called ‘collective’, living together with other families. Family life was in constant crisis, and infidelity was almost the rule. It ended in the parents’ divorce, and Guldager writes that the days surrounding their divorce will always bear the mark of catastrophe for her. She was 13-years-old and felt the ground disappea