In Memory of Andrzej Werbart (1946–2025)

It was with deeply felt sadness and loss that I, in February this year, received the devastating message that our dear colleague Andrzej Werbart had suddenly fallen ill and passed away. Andrzej was a highly active member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association, an esteemed psychoanalyst who worked with adults, as well as children and teenagers, and was a teacher, training analyst, supervisor, researcher, and professor emeritus of psychology at Stockholm University. Furthermore, he was an honorary member of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society and was engaged in numerous assignments there, for which he was also highly regarded.

Much can be said about Andrzej’s vast psychoanalytic and scientific oeuvre. This is only a summary of some of it. Andrzej became first a psychologist, then a psychotherapist, and a psychoanalyst, member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association in 1987. For many years, he worked at Långebro with patients suffering from severe mental conditions. Subsequently, he became interested in empirical research, which would become one of his many significant contributions to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Andrzej finished his doctoral thesis ‘Patterns of repetition and change in psychoanalytically informed therapeutic environment for severely disturbed patients’ in 1997. Until the very end of his life, Andrzej continued to combine his clinical work as a psychoanalyst in private practice with his academic research. As a researcher, he was first enrolled at Psykoterapiinstitutet in Stockholm in 1998 and then at Stockholm University from 2010.

Due to Andrzej’s curious and open attitude, his central European origin in Poland, and broad intellectual interests, he contributed with a multidimensional, polyphonic perspective on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and research. As a young man, Andrzej participated in students’ demonstrations for democratic rights in Warsaw, where he studied philosophy. He was put in prison by the communist regime, and during the