Tomas Böhm: 1945–2013

Tomas Böhm died suddenly and unexpectedly on 29 May 2013. This was a painful shock and a deep loss for his wife for 30 years, Suzanne Kaplan, also psychoanalyst, his children, stepchildren and grandchildren, his brother with his family and his many friends.

It was, and is, also a great loss for the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association. Tomas was a much appreciated and much liked member of the Association, where he through the years held several important posts. At his death, he was its Vice President.

Tomas’ parents fled from the increasingly anti-Semitic Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi troops had invaded Austria. They were Jews and social democrats and came to Sweden through the help of Swedish social democrats. They settled down in Solna, a suburb outside Stockholm, where Tomas and his elder brother grew up. After college, Tomas studied for the medical profession at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, specialising in psychiatry. He had an early interest in literature, music and politics, and after meeting psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists, he decided to apply for psychoanalytic training at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society. He began this training when he was 28 years old in 1973; he became a full member in 1979 and a training analyst in 1992.

Tomas was an appreciated teacher and requested supervisor, and as mentioned above, he held several important positions, first in the Swedish Society as chairman of the Admission Committee and from 1994 to 1997 as the Director of Training at its Institute. The two Swedish psychoanalytic societies (the Society and the Association) fused in 2010 to form the new Swedish Psychoanalytical Association and in 2012 Tomas was elected its Vice President.

Tomas worked as a psychoanalyst in private practice and in later years also as a couples’ therapist together with his wife, Suzanne Kaplan. For several years in the 80’s he worked as a teacher and supervisor at the Institute of Psychotherapy in Stockholm, which was then a well-ren