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Our well-known colleague, the Swedish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Johan Cullberg, born 1935, has written about his childhood and youth, and about his further adult development in Swedish medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. For a reader like me, being of about the same age as the author, this is a very valuable reminder both of how family life could be in the thirties, forties and fifties, how it was to be a medical student in the fifties, and of the different phases that psychiatry has gone through during all these years.
Johan Cullberg is an experienced writer, both as a non-fiction writer and as a biographer. He tells his version of his life of about seventy years in an interesting, sometimes fascinating, sometimes engaging, and sometimes surprising way. When you have read about his “Ingmar Bergman like” childhood and youth in the Bishop's house in Västerås, you really wonder how this young man would later on manage in medicine and psychiatry. And eventually, the reader is given the answer. To some extent, the book is therefore a page turner.
The book is divided into three parts: I: Years of upbringing, II: Student years and III: Psychiatry. I have no intention to present a summary of these three sections, but will give some reasons why one should read them.
As an introduction, in the middle part and as an after-word, Johan Cullberg lets us meet his elder brother, the very gifted painter Erland Cullberg, who is the artist of the drawing “The psychiatrist”, placed on the front of the book. This brother fell ill with schizophrenia when he was in the middle of his twenties and never remitted completely, although he became and still is a highly regarded expressive colouristic painter. Unfortunately, as Cullberg sees it, when the brother at first fell ill, he was hospitalised for almost four years and desperately treated with a series of ECT and high doses of medication, but without any result. On the contrary, Cullberg still thinks that this way of treating a fir