Henrik Sjöbring and the concept of individual psychology in psychiatry

In 1913 Henrik Sjöbring presented his thesis, ‘Den individualpsykologiska frågeställningen inom psykiatrien’ [‘The question of individual psychology in psychiatry’] in Upsala Läkareförenings Förhandlingar (1), the principal aim of which was to construct a system for characterizing the various dimensions of personality. The system presupposed that it is possible to distinguish different fundamental characteristics, or factors, in our innate psychic constitution and that combinations in different degrees of these fundamental characteristics could produce an infinite number of personality variations. Extreme positions, above and below the median, could result in mental illness. At that time this stance was new, but it corresponds well with contemporary beliefs. A person’s personality and its importance for illness, particularly mental illness, has always been interesting, both generally and in medicine. For a long time, a barrier to meaningful typology was the inadequate knowledge about the ‘site of the soul’ and later, when the brain’s role in this connection was established, the functioning of the brain. At the start of the last century this issue was beginning to be dealt with in a more modern way, and Kraepelin’s classification in 1899 of two categories of ‘madness’, dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and manicdepressive psychosis, was crucial (2-4). The importance of the personality in relation to mental illness is, however, probably most apparent in the case of less severe forms of illness, where a psychotic condition has not been able to eradicate to any great extent the personality’s fundamental characteristics. The development of psychology in the twentieth century has led to many different typologies, of which Henrik Sjöbring’s ‘individual psychology’ was the first with its systematic and modern approach that foresaw later developments. Sjöbring is generally acknowledged as Sweden’s most influential twentieth-century psychiatrist and a leading professor in psychiatry. Torsten Frey wrote in 1964: