Obituary

Our colleague and friend Bo Larsson has sadly passed away after a short illness on 5 April, just 2 months before his 79th birthday. Ever since 2004, he and his wife, Lis Lind, a retired psychoanalyst also, had been living in Helsingör, Denmark.

Freud wrote in his ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ that it looked as if ‘analysis were the third of those “impossible” professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’ He had been thinking about the exacting demands of practising psychoanalysis on the personality and the complex nature of – and resistance to – an activity that strives after the truth about ourselves and the manifestation of those illusions which none of us willingly like to relinquish.

After a long working life, Bo Larsson however could state that psychoanalysis was a most rewarding profession. He regarded psychoanalysis as a science in its own right which formed the basis for an undoubtedly effective method of psychological treatment. Bo was a gifted clinician who managed to personify the interconnection between theory and practice. He communicated openly how he thought and worked in ‘An Analyst at Work in Sweden’, published in ‘Analysts at Work: Practice, Principles and Techniques (The Master Work)’, ed. Joseph Reppen, Jason Aronson, 1977.

Bo Larsson was active as a psychoanalyst, teacher and supervisor for almost 30 years without ever doubting the value and significance of psychoanalysis for the individual and society alike. Always open for theoretical and clinical advances in psychoanalysis, he was however quite wary about any tendency to get rid of the cornerstones in Freud’s ideas and to revert to an unscientific and pre-psychoanalytic way of thinking. As he was fond of saying salt should retain its saltiness.

Bo was active in the discussions about the philosophical status of psychoanalysis, after being influenced earlier by Thomas Szasz