In memoriam. Inger Anita Brynestad

Our dear colleague Inger Anita Brynestad died on 3 November 2014. She was 60 years old.

She wanted to be a psychologist – Anita knew that from a very early age. The university was like a higher horizon for Anita – she was in a hurry to come to Blindern. After completing her studies in 1983, she started to work clinically as a psychologist with HIV/AIDS patients. She got an offer to take a PhD within this field, but refused. Instead she chose to concentrate on studying psychoanalysis. She became a specialist in clinical psychology with intensive psychotherapy and trained as a psychoanalyst.

Psychoanalytic therapy became her professional field. From 1991 Anita worked as a private practitioner within the public health care system. She became a training-therapist, supervisor and teacher at the Institute for Psychotherapy (a training institute for psychoanalytic therapy) and served as a training director here from 2001 to 2005. She was also a teacher at the Clinic for Dynamic Psychotherapy, Department of psychology, University of Oslo. Through her work, Anita influenced a whole generation of Norwegian psychologists and psychiatrists.

Practicing psychotherapy requires solid public frames, which Anita fully understood. As a representative for Norwegian Psychological Association, she was a driving force for establishing agreements with Helse Sør-Øst (regional health authorities), making it possible for specialists to work as psychotherapists in Norway. With deep engagement, she fought for the possibility of providing psychoanalytic therapy within the frame of the public health system for patients in need of in-depth therapy.

Anita was particularly familiar with the irrationality of the human mind. For her, an author like Henrik Ibsen could be as good at grasping and articulating this irrationality as a psychoanalyst would be. Anita was able to feel into the individual’s unique subjective world and create a climate for an open dialogue. She managed to receive and contain anger a