Det tystade samtalet

About the state, psychiatry and the attempts in Sweden to remove the influence of psychoanalysis.
For almost one hundred years, millions of people the world over have been helped to find ways out of their spiritual suffering with the help of psychotherapy. Sometimes it has been a case of ‘normal’ yet still very severe life crises; just as often, it has been about neurotic complaints with elements of compulsions and angst and sometimes deep depressions.

Most of the forms of therapy that have grown up during the 20th century have their roots in Freud’s psychoanalysis. The psychodynamic path of psychotherapy has been to attempt to understand the suffering person and by conveying this understanding help him to conquer his inner split.

Today there are medicines that – in an almost miraculous way – can lift depressions and dampen various forms of angst, and new forms of psychotherapy have developed which rather concentrate on methods based on behaviouristic psychology and cognitive science. In Sweden, and in many other countries, there are now forces that want to completely replace the psychodynamic paradigm with the new cognitive behavioural therapy paradigm (CBT). In just a few years, a large number of institutions have been closed down, educational programmes stopped, and new guidelines have been introduced for the treatment of psychic problems within psychiatry and the primary healthcare system.

The question is why a method and a way of looking at man which for an entire century has meant so much and helped so many, should be thrown on the rubbish heap? What happens with our human self-awareness when technicians are allowed to replace the psychodynamic way of meeting people’s problems with insight, interpretation and understanding?

Jurgen Reeder is known as an introducer of psychoanalytic theory – particularly French theory – and has also been active as a clinical psychoanalyst for more than 20 years.