[Tora Sandström and the history of psychotherapy in Sweden]

During the first decades of the 20th century several different kinds of psychotherapeutical technics were used among therapists working on the medical market place. Within the mental hospitals most of the patients did not get any kind of therapy at all, except occupational therapy and sedative drugs. The psychoanalytical theory was in Sweden as in many other countries received with very little enthusiasm and some psychiatrists even wrote articles and books where they tried to prove that Freud was totally wrong. Even if some of Freuds books were translated during the 1920s they did not influence the psychological and psychiatric debate until the 1930s. At the middle of the decade an association for psychoanalysis was established and several famous therapists visited the country and held lectures and courses. Especially among those psychiatrists working with children the interest in psycoanalytical thinking was growing very fast. But many of the other therapists seemed to be more interested in Alfred Adler than in Sigmund Freud and not so few tried to develop a psychological theory and a psychotherapeutical technic of their own. One of these pspychotherapists with a formal education from Vienna but mostly working with her own theory was Tora Sandström. Tora Sandström (1886-1949) established herself as a psychotherapist and with consultation rooms in Stockholm at the middle of the 1930s. Before that, but after her education in Vienna, she had written a psychobiography of the female novelist Victoria Benedictsson. She wanted the book to be accepted as a Ph.D. thesis, but it was rejected. During the following years she wrote two books about the importance of aggressiveness for the psychological development of children. During the 1940s Tora Sandström openly rejected the freudian theory, although she was still practising as a psychotherapist. Many of her colleagues seemed to join her in this escape from the freudian fold and in the intense discussion about the nature of psychotherapy during the years around 1950 Karen Horney and Harald Shjelderup was the most often quoted authors.