Insurance Office. But he’d really had only one genuine interest in life. In his spare time, he was a magician and would dress up in a home-made cape and a second-hand formal suit, crowning the outfit with a collapsible top hat, and make Erik and his friends sit on wooden chairs in the garage, where he’d built a little stage with secret trapdoors. Most of his tricks came from the Bernando catalogue: magic wands that would suddenly extend with a clatter, billiard balls that multiplied with the help of a shell, a velvet bag with secret compartments, and the glittering hand guillotine. These days Erik remembers his father with joy and tenderness: the way he would start the tape recorder with his foot, playing Jean Michel Jarre as he made magical movements over a skull floating in the air.
Erik hopes with all his heart that his father never noticed how embarrassed he became as he grew older, rolling his eyes at his friends behind his father’s back.
Erik had always wanted to become a doctor. He had never really wanted to do anything else, hadn’t imagined another kind of life. He remembers sitting there on the sofa in Sollentuna as an eighteen-year-old, staring at his top grades, then letting his gaze roam over his parents’ prototypically middle-class living room, the bookshelves empty of books but adorned with knick-knacks and souvenirs: silver-framed photographs of his parents’ confirmations, wedding, and fiftieth-birthday celebrations, followed by a dozen or more shots of Erik, from a chubby baby in a christening gown to a grinning teenager in stovepipe trousers.
His mother came into the room that day and handed him the application forms for medical school. His mother often said the Swedes were spoiled, taking their welfare society for granted when it was most probably nothing more than a small historical parenthesis. She meant that the system of free health care and dental care, free child care and primary education, free secondary schools and free university education, could simply disappear at any time. But right now there was an opportunity for a perfectly ordinary boy or girl to study to become a doctor, or an architect, or a top economist, at any university in the country without the need for a private fortune, grants, or charity hand-outs. As soon as Erik set foot in the medical school at Karolinska Institute, it was as if he had found his true home.
When he decided to specialise in psychiatry, he realised that the medical profession was going to suit him even better than he’d imagined. A trainee doctor has to perform eighteen months of general service before he is fully qualified to practise; Erik spent this period working for Médecins sans Frontières. He had wound up at a field hospital in Kismayo, south of Mogadisho, in Somalia. The equipment consisted of material discarded by Swedish hospitals: X-ray machines from the sixties, drugs well past their best-before date, and rusty, stained beds from old wards that had been closed down or rebuilt. In Somalia he encountered severely traumatised people for the first time: young people who would tonelessly relate how they had been forced to carry out horrific crimes; women who had been so severely abused they were no longer-able to speak. Working with them—with children who had become completely apathetic and had lost the desire to play; with women who were unable to look up and meet another’s eyes—Erik discovered that he wanted to devote himself to helping people who were held prisoner by the terrible things that had been done to them, who were still suffering despite the fact that the perpetrators were long gone.
Upon returning home, Erik trained in psychotherapy in Stockholm. But it was not until he specialised in psychotraumatology and disaster psychiatry that he came into contact with the various theories regarding hypnosis. What he found most attractive about hypnosis was its speed, the fact that a psychiatrist could get to the root of trauma
Erik hopes with all his heart that his father never noticed how embarrassed he became as he grew older, rolling his eyes at his friends behind his father’s back.
Erik had always wanted to become a doctor. He had never really wanted to do anything else, hadn’t imagined another kind of life. He remembers sitting there on the sofa in Sollentuna as an eighteen-year-old, staring at his top grades, then letting his gaze roam over his parents’ prototypically middle-class living room, the bookshelves empty of books but adorned with knick-knacks and souvenirs: silver-framed photographs of his parents’ confirmations, wedding, and fiftieth-birthday celebrations, followed by a dozen or more shots of Erik, from a chubby baby in a christening gown to a grinning teenager in stovepipe trousers.
His mother came into the room that day and handed him the application forms for medical school. His mother often said the Swedes were spoiled, taking their welfare society for granted when it was most probably nothing more than a small historical parenthesis. She meant that the system of free health care and dental care, free child care and primary education, free secondary schools and free university education, could simply disappear at any time. But right now there was an opportunity for a perfectly ordinary boy or girl to study to become a doctor, or an architect, or a top economist, at any university in the country without the need for a private fortune, grants, or charity hand-outs. As soon as Erik set foot in the medical school at Karolinska Institute, it was as if he had found his true home.
When he decided to specialise in psychiatry, he realised that the medical profession was going to suit him even better than he’d imagined. A trainee doctor has to perform eighteen months of general service before he is fully qualified to practise; Erik spent this period working for Médecins sans Frontières. He had wound up at a field hospital in Kismayo, south of Mogadisho, in Somalia. The equipment consisted of material discarded by Swedish hospitals: X-ray machines from the sixties, drugs well past their best-before date, and rusty, stained beds from old wards that had been closed down or rebuilt. In Somalia he encountered severely traumatised people for the first time: young people who would tonelessly relate how they had been forced to carry out horrific crimes; women who had been so severely abused they were no longer-able to speak. Working with them—with children who had become completely apathetic and had lost the desire to play; with women who were unable to look up and meet another’s eyes—Erik discovered that he wanted to devote himself to helping people who were held prisoner by the terrible things that had been done to them, who were still suffering despite the fact that the perpetrators were long gone.
Upon returning home, Erik trained in psychotherapy in Stockholm. But it was not until he specialised in psychotraumatology and disaster psychiatry that he came into contact with the various theories regarding hypnosis. What he found most attractive about hypnosis was its speed, the fact that a psychiatrist could get to the root of trauma
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