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The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Societies were founded during the thirties, were accepted as IPA members in the fifties and sixties, and the first pioneering generations of psychoanalysts in Scandinavia have left the profession a long time ago. Being now a senior myself, having known personally quite a few competent and inspiring clinicians from one or two generations ago, I have often felt that it is a pity that their thoughts and experiences have remained inaccessible to new practitioners in the field. A few outstanding clinicians were too busy helping patients to spend time on writing, and they were unfortunately rarely interviewed while there would still have been time available to preserve some accounts of their professional development and insights, in order to inspire newcomers in our field. A book like Gudrun Bodin’s, where she generously shares with the reader her experiences as a clinician, is all the more welcome. In English, the title of the book would be ‘Seen and understood.’ An approximation of a translation of the subtitle would probably be ‘About the psychoanalytical space’, although the Danish word ‘rum’ means both ‘room’ and ‘space’. As we will see, the book covers both meanings.
Bodin’s project started off modestly enough as a wish to convey to her own children and grandchildren something about this ‘mystic’ profession of ours, but she widened her scope to want to reach anybody who may be interested in knowing more about psychoanalysis today. She writes from the perspective of somebody who has 45 years of experience as a psychologist and 30 years of practice as a psychoanalyst. Her book is organized in four parts. Part 1, ‘Psykoanalytikeren på arbejde’ (Eng: “The psychoanalyst at work») and part 3, «Det gør ondt at vokse» (Eng. «Growing hurts») contain explanations of psychoanalytic theoretical concepts and extensive clinical illustrations of analytic processes where different developmental challenges unfold in the relationship between patient and