A doctoral dissertation about Ester Henning

Irja Bergström at the Department of History of Art, Gothenburg University, Sweden, has written a doctoral dissertation about Ester Henning. The dissertation is an analysis of Ester Hennings life and art.

Detailed studies of life experiences and artistic work
Bergström got the idea of her topic when someone showed her pictures made by Ester Henning. Bergström was amazed by the fact that someone with the illness schizophrenia was able to create pictures of flowers, women´s bodies, and animals, with so much sound spontaneity. She wanted to try to understand how this was possible. Behind the dissertation lie, among other things, detailed studies to find correlations between Ester Hennings life experiences and her artistic work.

Tries to understand the disease
The writer also tries to understand the disease schizophrenia both from a biological and a psychodynamic perspective. In her introduction to the dissertation Irja Bergström says that she with her humanistic education found it easier to take in the reasoning of the dynamic psychiatry.