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Carl Severin Raaum Albretsen died peacefully at Bærum Hospital, 6 September 2012. An engaged, warm and respected colleague is sadly no longer with us.
Carl Severin was born in the small coastal town of Brevik in southern Norway, 17 May 1926, and was proud of being born on the Norwegian National Day. He was more reluctant, however, to mention his service in the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War.
Soon after the war ended, he started medical studies in Copenhagen and qualified in 1952. In those days, Brevik was a sailor's town and all young men from the area ritually went to sea, preferably on a whaling ship in the Antarctic. It was therefore no surprise when Carl Severin got an engagement as ship's surgeon on a floating whale-oil boilery and sailed to the southern hemisphere for the whaling season. Trying tasks for the young doctor were plentiful, for instance, when he was forced to perform an appendectomy, days and weeks away from any hospital or surgical expertise.
In 1961, he qualified as a psychiatrist and many areas of psychiatry came to interest him. Initially, he was engaged in work with psychotic and severely depressed patients. Soon, he became interested in relational themes, not least the father-son relation along with family issues. As a young boy, he experienced his parents' divorce, and it is possible that the family conflicts and the subsequent missing of his father were influential in the decision to engage in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
His first experience in therapy was with the renowned character-analytic therapist Ola Raknes. Carl Severin later often mentioned this therapy with respect for his therapist and his personal gain connected to the awareness of the body. Subsequently, he had his psychoanalysis with Fiffi Piene. At that time, he had the idea it was important for him to experience therapy with both a “father- and a mother-figure”. Yet when summing up later, his impression was gratefulness for both therapies and he felt in his