The First Finnish Psychobiography

In Finland, psychoanalytic ideas arrived slowly. In the 1910s and 1920s, few scholars touched upon psychoanalytic issues. For example, philosopher Rolf Lagerborg wrote in 1918 about the psychoanalytic interpretations of art and published a short book on Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, theologian, and mystic (The Case Swedenborg in the Light of Newer Research, 1924; translated into English by the author, as are the remaining citations). Lagerborg, calling himself an “amateur pathographist,” mixed psychoanalytic and “psychoserological” (nowadays psychoendocrinological) views, while depicting Swedenborg’s mythomaniac and grandiose religious heaven and hell visions, sexual-ecstatic daydreams/fantasies, and old-age anxieties. Among the pioneers of psychoanalysis, only Eduard Hitschmann had earlier, in a short article from 1912, written on Swedenborg’s paranoiac traits and infantile regressions. However, Lagerborg’s work was a quick plunge into some personality features rather than a biographically-based study.

The only Finnish psychoanalyst before WWII, Yrjö Kulovesi, did not publish in the field of psychobiography. It was left to the young literary and cultural critic Tatu Vaaskivi (1912–1942) to publish the first Finnish psychobiography, F. E. Sillanpää: Life and

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Works (1937), on Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1888-1964), who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1939. Vaaskivi was a precocious autodidact who had become acquainted with psychoanalytic personality theories and interpretations of symbols, Jung’s and Kretschmer’s typologies, and Adler’s conceptions of compensation. He had the privilege of personally knowing Sillanpää and being able to conduct long interviews, during which he recorded the author’s reminiscences from early childhood to later age. A large part of the work consists of biographical material derived straight from Sillanpää himself.

Vaaskivi conceived of his biography as more of a “psychological novel” than a strictly academic literary study. For the Freudian psychoanalyst Yrjö Kulovesi, Vaaskivi was a charlatan who flirted with psychoanalysis in order to produce sensationalism. In Vaaskivi’s work, there are no references but vivid and empathic presentations and interpretations that stylistically remind readers of Stefan Zweig or Egon Friedell. Biographical details are enlivened by dramatizations and fictive ingredients, while bridging Sillanpää’s personality development and experiences to his writing career and narrative art. Sillanpää’s narration was often attached to merging human emotions and life destinies with huge visions of nature, unity, and biological cycles.

Vaaskivi’s leading assumption leans on developmental determinism: “primal experiences” or “visions” from Sillanpää’s childhood and youth determined both his personality and writing characteristics. The most dynamic primal experience was reconstructed by Vaaskivi from Sillanpää’s childhood when he made a short escape from his small cottage to the shore of a large lake, resulting in an intrapsychic conflict between a cramped home and a wide landscape, leading to parental reproaches to the child and his ensuing guilty feelings. Vaaskivi linked Sillanpää’s youth neurosis, agoraphobia, to this early psychic constellation that was alleviated by a summer experience in Sillanpää’s childhood landscape, fusing the ever-changing natural microcosm of a mill stream and the stagnant morning light.

In Sillanpää’s youth, his agoraphobia is seen by Vaaskivi to have disappeared through a cathartic sauna experience on Christmas night 1913. Otto Rank’s birth trauma theory and Ignaz Feuerlicht’s “Analysis of the Idyllic” (Die psychoanalytische Bewegung, 5, 1933, 167–86) contributed to Vaaskivi’s interpreting sauna as an idyllic primal state, a womb-like place, a “dark, closed, pressing

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 forecourt” (F. E. Sillanpää, 1937, 269), where the young Sillanpää returned to a prenatal state and finally, through a narrow gate, reached out to a renewed vital existence and to the conviction of his writer’s mission. “In one night, personality gets a new face!” Vaaskivi (ibid., 84) stated in his work that included the first suggestions of the psychoanalytic aspects of sauna.

Vaaskivi also thought that he found evidence for this cathartic experience in Sillanpää’s 1928 short story “A Dream of Christmas,” thus making unfounded leaps from fictive events to an author’s life. Of course, he had also committed errors the other way round when he too trivially used biographical material to interpret the unconscious contents and motives of the author’s works. Such errors were common in early psychoanalytic studies of literature and art that tried to reveal the biographical symptomatic bases of writers’ and artists’ works as well as their motives, themes, complexes, myths, and symbols. Only later did most psychoanalytic studies of literary texts get rid of vulgar Freudianism and turn more into analyzing storytelling, textual devices, and contents without binding them bluntly to biographical issues. In Vaaskivi’s work, social, historical, ideological, and moral contexts of Sillanpää’s authorship are not approached. For example, the supposedly traumatic childhood event is framed without any historical or psychosocial factors.

In addition to psychoanalytic considerations, Vaaskivi applied the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer’s (e.g., Bodily Build and Character, 1921) ideas of periods (the ebb and flow) of human mood and personality types. Vaaskivi called this “ellipse theory” and claimed to have detected in Sillanpää the extreme lows in mood and writing recurring every seven years. This highly speculative conception of periodicity and character formation was untenable and stereotypical, but Vaaskivi never discarded this idea.

Although Vaaskivi had adopted ideas of Freudian neurosis theory and superego development, Adlerian inferiority complex, Jungian personality typology and individuation, and Rankian birth trauma theory, he shunned clinging to dogmatic psychoanalytic views. He was keener on poetically elucidating Sillanpää’s pantheistic and mystical dimensions, his biological realism that reflected archaic images from the childhood of humanity. He was interested in psychoanalysis that he esteemed as a vitalist myth and a large-scale worldview rather than as a psychological theory or a psychotherapy method. Later, after having hectically published in 1937-

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38 two other psychoanalytically oriented cultural critical works, he began writing novels, discarded psychoanalysis, and experienced self-recrimination and regrets because he was afraid that he had polluted his readers’ imagination with Freudian doctrines.

In Finland, unlike in the U.S., psychobiography has not been a popular genre. The few psychobiographies that have been published after Vaaskivi’s pioneer work are about writers (two psychological-psychiatric biographies of Aleksis Kivi, the national writer of Finland; one psychiatric biography of the Finnish poet Uuno Kailas). There is also one psychobiography of the Finnish scientist, folklorist, and explorer Carl Axel Gottlund. However, there are actually no full-length Finnish psychobiographies of artists, politicians, religious figures, or celebrities. On the whole, the range of Finnish psychobiographies is so limited that one is left to wonder if there is some Finnish specialty in avoidance of psychological perspectives concerning history, politics, and religion, and if this has to do with a reluctance to address personally intimate areas in connection with public figures. However, global networks and media entertainment encourage the confessions of intimate things and are full of minimal autobiographical reports on a daily basis. This puzzle will need further reflection in some other forums.

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