Traces of the past: an interview study with Finnish war children who did not return to Finland after the Second World War

ABSTRACT

This paper is an in-depth qualitative study based on interviews with 10 Finnish children who were evacuated to Sweden during Second World War and who did not return to Finland after the war. The interviewees were asked to tell about their lives. Nine of them were between 2 and 5 years and one was 7 years old at the time of evacuation. The aim was to study how their childhood experiences were reflected in adult memories, how they remembered or did not remember. This paper focuses on the consequences of not knowing about one’s early life and also on whether it is possible to observe signs of the Finnish mother. She did not appear explicitly but could be sensed in the tendency of the interviewees to express negations, displacement and active denial. The interviewers’ countertransference gave a sense of the unspoken but present, as feelings of shame and diffuse anger. The difficulty for the interviewees to think about or reflect over the loss of mother and the experience of evacuation led to a reduced ability to create meaning – in the sense of knowing oneself. We also looked for a comprehensive picture of the war children’s experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Finnish war children
• evacuation
• the absent Finnish mother

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Mattsson

Barbara Mattsson is a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Her research has focus on Finnish war children. Her publications can be found in The Scandinavian Psychoanalytical Review and the journal Trama and Memory.

Sinikka Maliniemi-Piispanen

Sinikka Maliniemi-Piispanen is a psychologist and psychotherapist (IPA). Her special interest is in early interaction and development.

Jukka Aaltonen

Jukka Aaltonen is M.D., PhD., psychoanalyst and professor of family therapy (emeritus) in Jyväskylä university, Finland. His main scientific  interest has been in the development of the Need-adapted approaches of the treatment of schizophrenia wihin municipal psychiatry. He is, also, one of the first organizers of family therapy training systems on Finland.