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The earliest memories — the act is lost in oblivion, but the metaphor remains

By Autobiography, in English No Comments

One of the earliest memories from my childhood in Stockholm is not about things I did or the outer world I encountered, but about a metaphorical image I associate with my evening prayer — “Gud som haver barnen kär” (God, who holds the children dear]):

Gud som haver barnen kär,
se till mig som liten är.
Vart jag mig i världen vänder
står min lycka i Guds händer.
Lyckan kommer, lyckan går,
den Gud älskar, lyckan får.

[God who holds the children dear,
care for me who is so small.
Wherever I go in the world,
my happiness lies in the hand of God.
Happiness comes, happiness goes
those whom God loves will be happy.]

Every word of this very popular Swedish childrens prayer is forever imprinted in my mind; probably because I seem to have said it every evening, from early childhood up to the age of nine, and maybe even later (“Thomas and I alone at home. He went to bed reasonably early and we read God Who Holds the Children Dear”, wrote my grandfather in his diary in March 1956).

But I don’t have any memories whatsoever of saying the prayer. I don’t remember actually saying the words, or the social situation, or the time and place.

What I do remember, however, when I repeat these words today, is the image that went through my mind 60-65 years ago when I said the prayer.

Not our iron - but it could have been.

Not our iron – but it could have been.

When I say the penultimate line “Lyckan kommer, lyckan går” (Happiness comes, happiness goes) today, I still remember having the inner image of an iron moving forth and back on an ironing board: Iron comes, iron goes.

Ironing

(an anonymous German woman)

I probably didn’t understand what the word ‘lycka’ (happiness) meant. But ‘coming’ and ‘going’ were both familiar words; and ironing was an everyday household chore (for the women in our family) in the early 1950s, and was an easily available and appropriate metaphor for how something could ‘come’ and ‘go’.

I guess children often use physical metaphors when trying to conceptualise abstract concepts, when having books read to them, or hearing songs or prayers. But what interests me in this case is the memory aspects — namely, that it is the metaphorical image evoked by saying the prayer that has remained in my mind until this very day, whereas the memory of the actual, situated everynight act of praying seems to be lost in time.

Originally posted on Facebook on 30 November 2015, this post generated comments from Inge-Bert Täljedal, Kenneth Caneva and Signe Hegelund:

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Dreaming about Jacques Ellul

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From my diary, Wednesday 22 July, 1981:

“It’s early morning. I’m about to wake up, when I feel someone is standing by, or hanging above, the bed. I cannot see the face or shape. Then he (or she) is dissolved in a kind of weak explosion and disappears to the sound of a very loud voice screaming: ‘Jacques Ellul, Jacques Ellul’. I’m very upset.”

Says the Wikipedia article on Ellul:

“Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist. Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics. The dominant theme of his work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.”

Considered by many a philosopher, Ellul was by training a sociologist who approached the question of technology and human action from a dialectical viewpoint. His constant concern was the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and theologian, he further explored the religiosity of the technological society.

Also published on Facebook 3 November 2015), this post elicited the following conversation with  Anders Dræby (in Danish):

Thomas Söderqvist: Anders Dræby: du som er psykoanalytisk interesseret, har du nogen kommentar til min post om Jacques Ellul igår?

Anders Dræby: Nu ved jeg ikke, hvilken betydning Jacques Ellul har for dig. Men der er jo noget særligt knyttet til selve opvågningsøjeblikket, som også Ludwig Binwanger har skrevet om, der hvor man bevæger sig fra den ene eksistensdimension til den anden. Ifølge Binswanger vågner man i selv samme øjeblik som man går fra at være givet af drømmens univers til selv at blive handlende. Kunne være at Jacques Ellul har noget med handling/handlingslammelse at gøre, som har relation til dit øvrige liv på det tidspunkt?”

Thomas Söderqvist: Intressant!! Oops, ja, jeg var snøret ind i et komplekst net af netop handling og handlingslammelse på det tidspunkt!

Thomas Söderqvist: Anders, I had been interested in Jacques Ellul for a year or so, and had read two of his articles the night before. I thought Ellul was maybe a way of synthesizing Marx and Weber.

Thomas Söderqvist: And he is interesting. As the Wikipedia article says, “Considered by many a philosopher, Ellul was by training a sociologist who approached the question of technology and human action from a dialectical viewpoint. His constant concern was the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and theologian, he further explored the religiosity of the technological society.”

Anders Dræby: det teknologiske tyrranni, det er jo også i sig selv en slags lammelse, det er vel ikke så underligt, hvis det har sat nogle frustrationer i gang. For at lave en sammenligning. Da jeg var barn så jeg kong Salomons miner, hvor en gruppe mennesker bliver spærret inde i disse miner, og det havde jeg mareridt om i lang tid. En oplevelse af indespærrethed, der satte sig i mine drømme.

Thomas Söderqvist: Jeg sad fast i en intellektuel saks: på den ene side følte jeg at jeg havde gennemskuet intelligentsians mediebaserede vej mot samfundshegemoni, på den anden side var /(og er jeg stadigvæk) en del af samme elite.

Anders Dræby: åhh, det giver jo god mening. Så derfor måtte Jacques Ellul opløse sig til stor frustration.

Thomas Söderqvist: Tak for de gode synspunkter. Hvor i Binswangers forfatterskab kan jeg finde det der om opvågningsøjeblikket?

Anders Dræby: Traum und Existenz.

Thomas Söderqvist: 1000 sider? Har du mon en mere præcis side- (eller i hvert fald kapitel-)henvisning?

Anders Dræby: det er en artikel og ikke en lang tekst. den findes også oversat til engelsk med forord af Michel Foucault.

Thomas Söderqvist: Tak! Much appreciated!

Anders Dræby: Den tyske artikel er i Ludwig Binswanger (1994). Ausgewählte Werke, band 3, Assanger Verlag.

Thomas Söderqvist: Fint, det burde KB kunne klare! Endnu en gang tak for din kommentar – det lyder spot-on.

Anders Dræby: men værd at have Foucaults forord med

Counter-factual autobiography

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“Who has not played the great game of counter-factual autobiography?” (Simon Barnes, Ten Million Aliens, 2014)

What would my life have looked like if I hadn’t taken up a vacancy job at Roskilde University in 1973? And what if I had stayed in my first marriage? What would have become of me if I had remained in Sweden? A middle-level left-leaning bureaucrat in the environmental administration?

Should we take counter-factual autobiography seriously? Well, as methodological individualists suggest, history and society is made up by the actions of countless individuals. Thus counter-factual history — a respectable branch of history these days — could be said to have its foundations in counter-factual (auto)biography.

Any disagreements?

Also published on Facebook, 10 October 2015, this post generated several interesting comments:

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Money in the archive

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4x500 kronorMy document archive is not only a source for long forgotten thoughts and events. It’s also turned out to be a source for unexpected wealth. When I opened a thin notebook titled ‘Notater 16/3 1976 – 3/4 1976’ I found these four bank notes from 1972. Unfortunately it happened only once.

This post was also published on Facebook (5 October 2015), generating a few comments

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Moral and emotional self-spanking

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Dedicated much of October 2015 to moral and emotional self-spanking at the highest level. Read more than 40-year-old correspondence, diary entries, draft scripts, etc. from my ten years as a political activist and social analyst in the 1970s. It was even more depressing than reading the letters from the failed relationship.

[Ägnade en stor del av september-oktober 2015 åt moralisk och känslomässig själv-spanking på högsta nivå. Läste mer än 40 år gamla brevväxlingar, dagboksanteckningar, manusutkast m.m. från mina tio år som politisk aktivist och samhällsanalytiker på 1970-talet. Det var mer deprimerande än att läsa breven från de förlista parförhållandena.]
Published on Facebook (25 September 2015) this post generated the following comments:

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Episodic memory and narrative reconstruction

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In the course of this project, I’ve spent evening after evening recollecting memories from my childhood and school years. I have jotted down pages of notes with several hundreds of flashes of recollections of places, objects and atmospheres, and sometimes people and feelings (what I call unit memories) from age 4-5 to age 18.

It strikes me that all these memories are episodic, i.e., they are about singular events and they haven’t at any time come forth in any particular chronological order. In other words, my memory is not organised as a narrative.

I guess I could — later on, in writing — reconstruct all these episodic unit memories in some kind of narrative order. But why should I do so? Reconstructing them narratively would, I think, be to violate my phenomenological experience of my own past. What would I actually gain from turning the actual, apparently unstructured, episodic order into a structured narrative?

Are there any of my knowledgeable philosophical / psychoanalytic / biographical / phenomenological / psychological / literary friends out there who could help me?

An almost idential version was published on Facebook, 9 September 2015 and generated a very large number of very interesting comments: Read More

Time to take stock

By Autobiography, in English One Comment

As Søren Kierkegaard once famously said, life is lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.

blogpostI was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1946, right after the Second World War. Throughout my 50 years of academic life I’ve been busy, busy, busy. I have continuously explored new intellectual and scholarly vistas; like a fox I have jumped from one project to the other. I have rarely had time to, or interest in, looking back on my earlier life.

Now, 69 years later and with a professional career as an historian of science behind me, I still want to live forwards. Not least because I want to enjoy and foster my new brood of kids (here’s the youngest, he will be five years old next February).

But hopefully he and his two older sisters will benefit also from their father’s newly acquired interest in looking back on his career, his joys and sorrows, his few successes and way too many mistakes and lost opportunities. Although I think they should of course focus on living forwards for decades, they may nevertheless in some future time acknowledge the value of the old Greek notion of γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself).

The idea for this website dawned upon me one day last summer. I had decided to leave my job as Director of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen after 15 years, and suddenly I felt an urge to take stock before going on to the next — yet somewhat underdefined — phase in life

The title ‘Life Recollected’ reflects the various intellectual and scholarly aims of and interests behind the site. I will get back to these aims and interests in later postings, and will also treat them more systematically in the static pages listed in the menu at top of this page.

Published in a shorter version on Facebook 30 June 2015, generating a few comments:

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