Me as Tove-Starting Analysis with Tove Jansson

For some time, I have been working on a psychobiographical study of the Finnish author, painter, and illustrator Tove Jansson (1914–2001), who is mainly known for her children’s books about the fictional trolls, the Moomintrolls. The unconscious research, however, goes back to my childhood in Finland. In what follows, I will present some background on my current psychobiographical research on Jansson, share some initial difficulties and turning points in the research process, and discuss a few preliminary findings.

A starting point for my psychobiographical study on Tove Jansson was a research article on clinical psychoanalysis by Werbart and Levander (2016), which points out that psychoanalytic techniques should preferably be adapted to the patient’s personality and needs. Their findings, together with my clinical research into closeness and separateness in psychoanalytic work, drew my attention further to the concepts of relatedness and self-definition, as explored by Sidney J. Blatt as central, dynamic aspects of personality and personality development throughout the lifespan.

For various reasons, I also developed a deepening, but ini-

Page 205

tially not consciously related, interest in the personal history of Tove Jansson. Her artistic production was already very well known to me due to my Finnish background. While writing an article on my clinical research on closeness and separateness in psychoanalytic work (Wolf, 2023), I free-associatively brought Tove Jansson’s (1957) book Moominland Midwinter into dialogue with my findings.

Moominland Midwinter is a story about the Moomintroll, who wakes up from his winter’s sleep while the rest of the family still sleeps. All alone, he is cast into the cold, into what is, for him, the previously unknown winter world. I found the story to be a good metaphor for closeness and separateness, and I turned my research study through intertextuality into a kind of scientific “Moominstory.” While digging further into the mysteries of Moominland and Tove Jansson’s life, I learned that Moominland Midwinter is considered a turning point in her artistic production (Karjalainen, 2013; Westin, 2007). According to previous studies, the story expresses new themes and creative forces (Karjalainen, 2013; Westin, 2007).

As other research has suggested, Tove Jansson seems to have struggled with personal issues regarding self-expression, visibility, and invisibility; she also appears to have suffered from a creative crisis during the mid-1950s (Westin, 2007). Interestingly, Tove Jansson was a keen reader of work by the American psychoanalyst Karen Horney, especially her work on self-realization (Westin, 2007). All these things considered, I found it interesting to explore further what can be described as the hide-and-seek of visibility and invisibility in Tove Jansson’s work from the developmental perspective of the aforementioned concepts of relatedness and self-definition and Margaret Mahler’s individuation and separation as metaphors for the explored phenomena.

In the tradition of applied psychoanalysis, I presented some initial reflections on this from the perspective of relatedness, self-definition, individuation, and separation in an essay (Wolf, 2024) for a Finnish literary magazine published in Swedish. I also reflected on Moominland Midwinter from the developmental crisis, transience, and mourning perspectives. I started to consider the situation that is suggested as being a creative person’s mid-life crisis, as described by Cullberg (1992) in his study on August Strindberg’s and Stig Dagerman’s creators’ crises. These reflections led me to pursue further psychobiographical research into Tove Jansson.

Page 206

However, my initial assumptions are only to be seen as necessary points of departure and, simultaneously, as an expression of my preunderstandings, which might constrain my research and hinder me from getting to know the “real” Tove Jansson.

Visibility and invisibility are recurrent themes in Tove Jansson’s books and artistic production (Westin, 2007). The most evident one is the story about Ninny, the invisible child, a tale in the book Tales from Moominvalley (Jansson, 1962). “The Invisible Child” is about a child who has been badly treated and has therefore become invisible. Ninny has, we learn, been “frightened the wrong way by a lady who had taken care of her without really liking her” (Jansson, 1962, p. 125). Thanks to the kindness of the Moomin family, Ninny eventually starts to emerge. However, she still does not know how to play, and her face cannot be seen yet. Not until she accidentally gets control of her aggression can she create herself into a fully visible existence.

Another story, not often reflected on through the lenses of visibility and invisibility, is the picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle? from 1960. I think Who Will Comfort Toffle? is a story about the shy Toffle, who is visible but hiding. He longs for togetherness but first has to learn that he needs to come out from the shadows if people are to know about his secretive existence. The story’s turning point is when Toffle becomes more angry than scared and meets and falls in love with Miffle. The story can be interpreted in many ways. In my reading from the point of view of psychobiographical investigation into Tove Jansson, I tend to see both “The Invisible Child” and Who Will Comfort Toffle? as stories about the creative process at the heart of human existence as well as artistic production.

I recently read an essay by Sophia Jansson (2014), Tove Jansson’s niece, where she recounted a very sweet and telling childhood memory. She was at the local shop with her aunt Tove. There was lovely dinnerware for dolls that she wanted. Her aunt told her that you cannot have everything, but if you truly love it, then you can have it! This episode and the tales about Ninny and Toffle, stories about visibility and invisibility in my mind, made me think about the background facts on Tove Jansson’s struggle with artistic self-realization. The creative act seems to require a lot of urge and faith and can be described as a transgression of necessity, the boundaries of our earthly existence, known as Ananke in Greek mythology (Werbart, 2014).

Page 207

In the spirit of Freud’s study, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (1910), rather than his “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), my current psychobiographical research project on Tove Jansson tentatively investigates her artistic production as a material through which the researcher can get to know the artist. As Elms (2005) pointed out, Freud’s Leonardo is an example of the vicissitudes of psychobiographical research. The psychobiographical researcher is, like the clinician, at the risk of projecting themself and their hypotheses into the subject of study. Although Freud struggled with interpreting from or into the patient or the material, he eventually chose the former, as seen in his Schreber Case (Lothane, 1992) and his case study on Dora (Werbart, 2005).

As a researcher working on getting to know the “real” Tove, I found myself possibly pushing her into a “template” of my psychoanalytical or personal theories rather than entering into a dialogue, opening up, and paving the way for the unknown to emerge. Cullberg (1992) likens the dialogue with the psychobiographical source material to a meeting with a living person. My aim is primarily not to find evidence for the hypothetical starting points but, according to psychobiographical research principles discussed in Cullberg (1992) and Elovitz (2018), to bring Tove Jansson to life through the source material instead.

My methodology employs the daydream as a means of getting to know someone or the source material and generating experiential knowledge. The daydream is perceived here as an intuitive or poetic understanding or experience of the countertransference not only from what is said or, as in this case, what is written in a book or said in an interview or painted—but also what is felt, awakened, and comes to life in me as a researcher in my encounter with the source material. At the beginning of my research project, I was intimidated by the risk of projecting myself into Tove. I needed to know “everything” about her, read it all, and do things systematically and profoundly. My seriousness resulted in a standstill. I gathered more and more material and waited for the big day when I was “ready.” I seemed to stand in front of a vast white canvas, waiting for the “real” Tove to appear, hoping she would emerge like her invisible child Ninny.

After some time, I realized that the big moment when I would feel “ready” and when the “real” Tove would magically appear might never come. As did Ninny, I suddenly realized that my

Page 208

active involvement was required. I think my waiting and gathering had not been in vain, as it had added links to the fragmentary material, and it blurred the boundaries of a figure and a canvas that were no longer blank. Maybe the right big moment came without knowing after all. I immersed myself into the Janssonian world in another freer yet more restrictive, active way. I took a psychoanalytic approach, exploring what would come out of that and allowing for the opportunity to learn something more about Tove Jansson through a dialogue with her literary production and other material that I chose through free associations.

Some of the major research questions in this project involve using Tove Jansson as an example to understand: Can we get to know the artist psychologically through their production? What are the central themes in Tove Jansson’s oeuvre? What do they say about her and her life? What happens within me when I am reading or watching Tove Jansson’s works? One could say that I have taken Tove Jansson into analysis to find out more and get the research process going. I have put myself in dialogue with her, one hour per day, five days a week, taking notes after each session. During this hour, I do not read about her. Instead, I read, watch, or contemplate her through her original works. A great challenge in this “analysis” is that my new analysand—Tove Jansson—cannot confirm or dismiss my interpretations.

Freud (1921) sees children’s play as a means of handling anxiety, and he likens creative writing to play and daydreaming. Beneath the Moomintroll’s modern “happy-go-lucky-surface” stems a sinister soil of civil and foreign war. The Moomin Valley can be seen as an aspect of Tove Jansson having worked through the Second World War in Finland, an interpretation that Tove Jansson would agree with herself (Westin, 2007). The first book, Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945 and is about the Moomintroll and his mother surviving as refugees in times of great disaster. Similar to Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908), Tove Jansson’s work points to the fact that the artist is hidden in the piece of art, and every piece of art is also recreated by each new reader or spectator. Following this line of thought, my psychobiographical research into Tove Jansson will thus inevitably contain something from me or partly be my creation, similar to what happened with Freud in his study on Leonardo (Elms, 2005).

D.W. Winnicott (1971) and Marion Milner (1950) high-

Page 209

light the activity of playing. They regard play not only as a recreation of a lost object, a working through, or a wishful dream. It is also a creative act producing something new, an ordinary, everyday activity through which the person creates themself into being through curiosity. As we can see, the creative activity involves temporal oscillation between the current event (anxiety in the here and now), the past (infantile anxieties), and the future (a wishful dream and/or something new that is created). The discussion about recreation and creation in the clinical setting can also be found in Freud’s (2003) Wolfman Case.

The psychobiographical method of taking Tove Jansson into “analysis” has been an interesting experience. From the beginning, I realized that I experienced fear of invading Tove with my interpretations, which is familiar to me from my clinical practice. This fear of projecting and invading had impeded creativity in my research process, but if I do not dare to have some opinion on Tove Jansson and give some kind of interpretation, I realized that I will never write a psychobiographical study on her. This means that my perfectionistic idea of knowing “everything” and “leaving it all to Tove” was a utopian one. Instead, I simply started somewhere and freely experimented with my interpretations of the case material.

At the start of this psychobiographical journey into Tove Jansson, I wanted to make myself invisible in the research findings and ensure that my work on Tove would be a story about Tove’s Tove instead of me as Tove. I still have some questions. One is: Do my reactions express something about the Janssonian game of hide-and-seek? Or are they just the production of my own psychological process? What are these stories about visibility and invisibility about? What do they mean “in” Tove Jansson?

My first reflections and interpretations have now been delivered in this paper—at the risk of projecting. Also, it is interesting that for my notes from the Tove Jansson sessions, I unconsciously brought a special notebook with a beautiful fairytale motif with two similar, but not quite identical, foxes sitting in a magical forest watching the moon. Me as Tove. Or Tove as me? To be continued.

Page 210