You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Phil. Mag. Lars-Johan Schalin was born in Helsinki on the 21th of March in 1931. He was the oldest of two sons of a military officer family. Schalin died at the age of 87 on July 1st in 2018 due to a long-term cardiovascular disease.
After living a few years at a base of the Finnish Air Force in Immola, the family returned to Helsinki where Lars-Johan completed his secondary education in the Swedish Normal Lyceum. He received the Matriculation Examination Certificate in 1949.
Due to closely observing the importance of emotional adaptation during early years of development, Schalin had great motivation to start his studies of psychology at the University of Helsinki. During his years of study he worked part-time as a psychologist in Nikkilä’s mental hospital where he had the opportunity to converse with the psychodynamically oriented chief physicians Johan Runeberg and Oscar Parland. This experience only further increased Schalin’s interest for psychoanalysis which he had come acquainted with under the tutelage of Olavi Viitamäki.
Encouraged by the example set by pioneers Tapio Nousiainen, Stig Björk, Pentti Ikonen and Veikko Tähkä, Schalin seeked psychoanalytic training abroad, since at the time there were none in Finland. Schalin married in 1953. With his wife Yvonne and daughter Christel they then moved to Switzerland in 1957. Later on the couple welcomed three more children.
In 1960 Schalin returned to Finland as a younger member of the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis. Shortly after Schalin started his psychoanalytic practice as a colleague to the other pioneers on the field. In Finland psychoanalytic training started in 1963. Along with other psychonalysts who had trained abroad Schalin played an important role as a Supervising and Training Analyst in the newborn society.
During the decades following 1960, Schalin’s contribution to the growth of psychoanalysis in Finland was substantial. For nine years he acted as the chief of the Training Institute in the Finnish Ps