ADELE JOHANSEN VS
By Lennart Sjöberg, professor
|
Lennart
Sjöberg, is a professor at the Center for Risk Research at the Stockholm School
of Economics. He is the scientific leader of the Foundation for Forensic
Psychology (Stiftelsen för Forensisk Psykologi) This article is published here with the kind consent of the author. |
This
is a description of a Norwegian adoption case. A woman, Adele Johansen, gave
birth to a daughter in 1989, but the child was placed in a foster home against
her will. The basis for that decision was alleged mental illness in Adele, but
that allegation was proven untrue and retracted already in 1991. Yet, the
authorities were unwilling to let Adele have her child back. Adele appealed in
the Norwegian courts to no avail, and later in the
Introduction
In
December, 1989, Norwegian citizen Adele Johansen gave birth to her second
child, a healthy and sound little girl, who was given the name Signe Malene. At
that point in her life, Adele had had a rowdy past. She had left her parents at
the age of 15 after a history of conflict with her father, and had only primary
education. She had given birth to a son when she was very young, in spite of
strong recommendations and pressure by authorities to have an abortion. She had
then lived with a man who, charming at first, had turned to physical abuse of
her and her son. He was a drug peddler and heavy drinker, but Adele never
developed any drug or alcohol habit. Adele contributed to the book
“Pappirdukker”2 (Johansen & Brodin, 1991) where she
described her relationship, the abuse she and her child had been subjected to,
and her fight to be allowed to keep her son. That fight she won, but the one
regarding her daughter was lost.
After
several years in an abusive relationship, Adele pulled herself together and
sought help from social authorities in Bergen, where she lived at the time. She
was now pregnant again and determined to have her second child. However, the
authorities refused to help her to get an apartment which she felt she needed
in order to break away from her destructive relationship, and instead they
offered her psychotherapy.3)
She refused therapy, and felt very badly treated. Thus began
a story of escalating conflict between her and the authorities. The story is
still going on, and Adele has paid by much suffering, so have her daughter and
the daughter’s foster parents. The tax-payers of Norway have footed the bill
which probably by now, after 12 years, amounts to at least 10 million NOK. 4) I
now briefly summarize the events of the case.
The process
A
few concrete accusations were made against Adele. In the months before the
birth of
Signe
Malene, Adele tested positive for marijuana at one time. This has later been
explained as the result of passive smoking at a party where several others
smoked marijuana. There may also have been some irregularities in her medical
check-ups of pregnancy, but that is a moot point which has not been proven and
seems to be false. A third aspect of greater importance was the moves that the
social authorities were making to have her son removed from her care and placed
in a foster family. Adele - and the son - strongly resisted these attempts, and
her relation to the authorities was severely damaged.
Thus
was the situation when she had given birth to Signe Malene. The child was
placed in temporary care after 2 days, against the wish of Adele, and she was
then allowed to see the child only for 2 hours per week during a few months. A
permanent foster placement was then made, again against Adele’s wish. Two
psychologists wrote assessment of her fitness as a parent. 5).
The one commissioned by the social authorities wrote a very negative
assessment, and claimed that she was mentally unstable and badly adjusted,
shown among other things by her negative attitude to the social authorities.
This assessment was contradicted by another psychologist, commissioned by Adele
herself, who saw her as fit to be a parent and her present tensions as due to
the life conditions she was exposed to. The authorities chose to ignore that
view and embraced the interpretation of Adele’s problems as being caused by
deeply rooted personality problems which could only be mitigated by many years
of intense psychotherapy.
After
about a year, however, Adele had made a very good new start in her life. She
had started living with the man who was the father of her son, and was in good
shape socially and emotionally. Psychologists, at this point, found her fit to
be a parent and they realized that the previous assessment of her had been
misleading, since she did not, after all, have profound and severe
psychological problems. Yet, the child had now become attached to the foster
parents, argued the psychologists, and moving her to Adele would constitute a
severe trauma to the child that Adele could not be expected to be able to deal
with, especially since she did not have trust in the authorities and the
psychological competence that they represented.
This
was in 1991. The process was then dead-locked for 10 years. Adele appealed the
decisions by the authorities but her appeal was rejected, on the basis of
psychological assessments. Adele also appealed to the European Human Rights
Court in 1990, had her case accepted in 1993 and a final sentence in 1996 which
supported her in her most important claim. The Court decided that her rights as
a parent must be respected and the child returned to her. The Court found that
a child should not be taken from a parent against her will unless the parent
was clearly unfit, and there was no longer an argument against Adele in that regard.
However, Norwegian authorities did nothing to adhere to that sentence, in spite
of Norway’s formal agreement to honour the Court’s decisions. 5).
On the contrary, they sided with the foster parents who wanted to adopt the
child. These decisions were always backed up by psychologists commissioned by
the courts or the authorities. The psychologists gave varied assessment and
arguments on the case, but they invariably ended up in support of the official
policy.
The
Oslo District and Appeals Courts decided, in 2000 and 2001, to award the foster
parents the right to adopt the child. This was in spite of them having
separated. The argument was based on attachment theory, and also on the wishes
of the girl herself, who stated she wanted to stay with her foster parents.
Adele was also denied visiting rights on the basis that she would cause
emotional problems if she were to see the child, or if the child were to visit
her and her new family in Denmark. The final sentence of the Appeals Court
stated that a new appeal by Adele to Strasbourg would at any rate take so long
time to process that the child would be an adult before a decision could be
expected. The Appeals Court apparently felt that they had no obligation to adhere
to the principles embraced by the European Court.
The
fact that the legal system takes such a long time to respond to the appeals
made by the parent - and the present case may be extreme but it does illustrate
a common tendency - works systematically to make the authorities’ decision
become harder and harder to change.
Attachment
theory fits very well in this context since it lends itself to the “scientific”
support of the increasing rigidity of the situation. Let us look a little
closer at the methods and theory applied by the psychologists and which have
consistently backed up the policy of depriving her of her rights as a parent.
Psychology applied?
A
major condition for a process such as the present one is clearly the existence
of licensed clinical psychologists. It is taken for granted that they, having
completed several years of academic training and practice and having achieved
official licensing, do represent a high scientific standard beyond the insights
of lay persons. It should be noted that the courts consistently listened to clinical
psychologists with practical experience. And also that they
listened to their own experts,
not those commissioned by Adele, however much they might have had in the way of
scientific and practical experience.
These
facts call for some reflection. First, why “clinical”? Clinical psychology is
about mental illness and adjustment problems, and none of the parties involved
has been said to have such problems - disregarding the initial assessment of
Adele which was retracted at an early stage. Clinical experience and constructs
may not be the best basis for the assessment of normal people. In addition, why
only “practical” psychologists? Research experience and qualifications seems
not to have been in much demand when the authorities made their decisions. Yet,
such qualifications may contribute important pieces of information, e.g. with
regard to the validity of the theory and assessment methods used. And finally,
why not accept the adversarial nature of the situation in full, and listen to
experts from all sides? The courts tended, apparently, to subscribe to the
somewhat simplistic view that psychologists commissioned by them or the
authorities were impartial and objective, while those commissioned by the
plaintiff were just saying what she paid them to say, to put it bluntly.
Yet,
it takes very little reflection to realize that the problem of bias is a
general one, not limited to one group of experts.
Another
possibility is that clinical psychology is considered to be about concrete
individual cases and therefore the area of choice in forensic applications. It
is true that case study material is more prevalent in clinical psychology than
in other areas of psychology, such as social or cognitive psychology, and also
that clinical psychology has a more holistic thrust. However, if this is true
it is so more from historical coincidence than anything else. Surely, cognitive
assessments can be made in an idiosyncratic way, and so can social
psychological analyses. There seems to be considerable confusion as to the feasibility of applying general psychological
principles to individual cases. Yet, doing so is no different from applying any
kind of general scientific knowledge to individual cases and this is surely
done all the time in, say, the practice of medicine or engineering. It would
be, to put it bluntly, ridiculous for an MD to argue in court that he or she
would not talk about a specific case or individual, only give a lecture on
general principles derived from medical science. 6 ).
What comes through very clearly in the case of Adele is that psychology is put
to rhetorical use, and that psychology as such was not really an important
factor in detached and objective assessment. This may be unavoidable. The
danger is that rational decisions and the protection of human rights are
sacrificed in order to implement and hold up decisions made on quite different
grounds, grounds that can never be defended openly. Reflection on this danger
could hopefully contribute towards mitigating the risk, however.
Much
importance is given by the courts and authorities to clinical experience. Apart
from the question of just how relevant it is, when normal people are assessed,
there is also the question of whether we learn at all from experience. This
question may sound paradoxical, but research has found that years of experience
in psychology or psychiatry have few effects beyond boosting confidence. In
other words, an illusion of skill is created, not skill itself. The effects of
training and experience that have been documented seem to be modest and occur
very early in training (Garb, 1998). Expertise in general is like this, with a
few exceptions that need not bother us here (Shanteau, 1992).
Dynamic
psychology, and attachment theory is part of that field, is very useful in
social and forensic practice, for several reasons that need not have anything
to do with its validity, which has been challenged severely in many current
publications. Let us look at the reasons for its usefulness in forensic and
administrative settings.
First,
dynamic psychology uses esoteric language and builds upon an extensive, and
loosely organized body of literature. This strategy helps toward deterring “lay
persons” from questioning it - it simply demands so much time and effort to
learn what it is all about, and even more to realize its many weaknesses and
learn about the critical analyses that have been published by Grünbaum
(Grünbaum, 1993), Crews (Crews, 1995, 1996, 1998), Scharnberg (Scharnberg,
1993a, 1993b) and many others. Freud is a towering giant whose contemporary
function is to legitimize the whole enterprise, and his work is well known and
held in high regard by many intellectuals, as well as by a group of
psychologists and psychiatrists. This is so in spite of the lack of any
evidence whatever that psychoanalytic therapy has the unique healing effects
that Freud claimed for it in some of his writings, and that few contemporary
psychologists practice psychoanalysis in the way prescribed by him.
Second,
dynamic psychology is based on notions about psychopathology, hence biased
towards construing how things can go wrong rather than how they can go right.
Psychologists have, one generation after the other, been surprised to discover
that people adjust on their own and that what looks like disastrous conditions
may not have disastrous psychological consequences (Luthar, Cicchetti, &
Becker, 2000; Masten, 2001). In addition, serious adjustment problems or very
destructive behavior cannot always be explained with life experiences, but can
easily be construed in that manner with the help of psychodynamic concepts.
This kind of thinking has permeated culture and is repeatedly the theme of
movies and novels, hence gaining general credibility 7)
.
Third,
dynamic psychology embraces the notion that people can, and should, be assessed
by means of intuitive, holistic, judgment - at times aided by projective tests.
In a Swedish TV program a few years ago a case was shown where a father was
hunted by the authorities who wanted to take his sons into custody for transfer
to a foster home. No clear reason was given for the decision by the social
workers, who were ultimately responsible, but in the end, reference was made,
in Swedish, to “tyst kunskap” (tacit knowledge). There was a “feeling” that
something was wrong in the family, and this feeling had grown to become a
conviction.
Feelings
like these are common and can have any number of causes, and are the basis of
the popular term “person chemistry” (Sjöberg & Tollgerdt-Andersson, 1985).
We all have our likes and dislikes, a fact which must of course be accepted,
but those subjective reactions become very problematic when used by those in
power, and against us. Dynamic psychology offers a neat way of justifying our
indulgence in such subjectivistic thinking. Holism is an untenable (Ruscio,
2002) but popular position. The welfare state is rightly concerned with the
psychological well-being of its people. However, when that reasonable notion is
put into practice, many problems arise. How should psychological well-being be
assessed and how can it be assured? Clinical dynamic psychology has offered its
services to put the notion into practice. The results are very mixed, to say
the least. Dynamic psychology is much too fragile a basis for decisions with
enormously important consequences, in particular if such decisions become more
or less irreversible.
The role of theory
Psychological
theory is being applied widely in society, not least in the courts. This may sound
good, since theory is held in high regard. Yet, theory has at least two dark
sides. First, using a theory of questionable validity is highly risky. Second,
use of a theory tends to create a premature closure and restricted information
collection, and hence may lead to very misleading recommendations and
conclusions.
Skinner
wrote a classical article where he argued that theories of learning are not
necessary (Skinner, 1950). He may have gone too far, but he had a good point.
Theories are not necessarily good, neither in practical work nor in research.
The very notion of hypothesis testing is questionable, yet seldom questioned.
Theory and hypothesis driven work is held in high esteem. It is debatable just
how good hypothesis testing is for finding truth about things psychological. In
a very famous murder case in Sweden, two doctors had their licences revoked
after having been accused of murdering a prostitute, and cutting up her body
(Lindeberg, 1999). Many aspects of that case are illustrative, but here only
one will be mentioned: the hypothesis driven police investigation. At a very
early point, search for a perpetrator was concentrated on one person alone.
Other, seeming relevant, possibilities were ignored. And of course, success in
a police investigation becomes less and less likely as time passes by after a
crime. Nobody was convicted of that particular murder (if it was a murder). The
assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme is likewise still unsolved,
in spite of enormous resources having spent on police investigations. In this
case, a whole first year was wasted on a flimsy and arbitrary initial guess
that the perpetrators were Kurdish terrorists. No evidence for that was ever
found, except of the most speculative and far fetched kind.
Catching
a liar is a third case in point. People have a very hard time to do so, in
spite of the common conviction to the opposite effect (Vrij, 2000). Those who
succeed seem to be the ones who keep an open mind, as long as possible, and
thus manage to avoid both types of error: to accuse somebody of lies while she
tells the truth and to believe in a liar. It is clearly very difficult for
courts to catch liars, and judges, prosecutors and police officers all
subscribe to folk psychology notions about lying, which have been shown
repeatedly, in empirical research, to be erroneous (Granhag & Strömwall, in
press).
The
case of Adele was highly theory driven, in particular with frequent references
to Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1969, 1973). But the validity of the theory is
quite questionable (Atkinson et al., 2000; Belsky & Cassidy, 1995)
{Schneider, 2001 #5479}. A summary statement about the current scientific
status of the theory was made by Thompson {Thompson, 1998 #5482}:
“Attachment
theorists believe that attachment security begins relationally and shapes a
variety of personality processes and representations of self and others.
Although this formulation is useful as a broad outline, there is little
consensus about what these internal constituents of attachment security are,
how early they form, how long they remain dependent on continuing sensitive
care, how they change with development, and how multiple attachments are
incorporated within these internal processes. (p. 47)
In
another article, Thompson {Thompson, 1999 #5511} writes:
“..
even when the outcome domains that are most directly pertinent to attachment
formulations are considered, current research yields few reliable, long-term
consequences of attachment security in infancy that would justify the classic
theoretical portrayals of mother-infant attachment as a prototype of later love
relationships, or the current formulations of attachment as a foundation for
later adaptation.” (p. 280).
There
is by now very extensive research on Attachment Theory and the results point to
a possible, but quite weak, explanatory power of the theory. Many other factors
than those based on the theory need to be taken into account. The courts and
authorities were systematically misled by in the present case by psychologists
who ignored, or did not know about, the scientific criticisms of the theory.
The courts should have listened not only to practicing psychologists but also
to researchers qualified to assess the scientific value of this theory and
possibly also of other theories and methods applied by psychologists in the
case.
Attachment
theory seems to have contributed towards ignoring other aspects beyond the
attachment bonds to the care takers. The very knowledge that one has a
biological family different from the care takers is no simple thing to deal
with. Culture has many dimensions of great importance beyond attachment bonds
to the immediate family.
Can research on the effects of interventions be of any
help?
In
Adele’s case, the crucial questions were concerned with the well-being of the
child. How do children fare when adopted or placed in foster homes? There is
empirical research on such matters, but mostly from the USA. Some Swedish
investigations can also be mentioned, but there are no extensive Norwegian studies,
as far as I know.
There
are important limitations to the applicability of such research. First, legal,
social and economic conditions are very different in the USA and Scandinavia.
Adoption and foster home care may, in reality, mean very different things in
different societies. Second, this is a kind of research which can never
establish any certain conclusions as to cause and effect.
There
are always many alternative explanations to any one finding. Statistical
control of some of these alternatives is useful but can only very partially
rule them out. Current behavioral research is also, in spite of many years of
cogent criticism (Schmidt, 1996), dominated by hypothesis testing and the
determination of statistical “significance”. Such work involves the
establishment of non-random patterns of data, but it is very easy to find
non-random patterns when large samples are used. Even minuscule and practically
and theoretically unimportant patterns can be documented as non-random.
With
these reservations, let us look at some of the empirical findings. Research on
adopted children versus those staying in their original families has shown two
things (Brodzinsky & Schechter, 1990; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky,
1998; Miller, Fan, Christensen, Grotevant, & van Dulmen, 2000). First,
there are small but consistent average differences in favor of those children
who stay with their original family. Second, there is an extreme group of
adopted children who develop adjustment problems and who are later seen in the
mental health care system, where adoption cases are over represented. Research
on foster home care is less extensive but points to even greater problems for
these children. However, foster home care is a different thing in the USA than
in the present Norwegian case. Foster home care tends to be short, and children
may switch foster families frequently.
The
present case is quite different from the typical adoption-foster home care
conditions in important respects. There was no problem situation in the original
family which affected the child, since she was taken from her mother
immediately after birth. And while she stayed for a decade in foster home care,
it was the same stable home for most of the time, and the foster parents had
planned to adopt her from the very beginning. A later complication was the
break-up of the foster family, which may have been an important destabilizing
factor. Be that as it may, general cross-sectional research on adoption and
foster home care seems to be of marginal relevance to the case, at best. This
is true also for Swedish research, some of which has been cited selectively in
the case. For example, Bohman and co-workers reported that adopted children had
improved adjustment at the age of 15, but were maladjusted on the average, at
the age of 25 years (Bohman & Sigvardsson, 1980; Bohman & von Knorring,
1979). The Norwegian authorities cited the first result and ignored the second.
A fair assessment would have been to say that results were unclear, or
inconsistent, but more important, the present case really has so many important
unique properties that averages from large groups tell very little.
What can be learned from the present case for the
forensic practice of psychology?
The
profession of psychologists has risen in Scandinavia during the last 40 years,
in close relationship to the expansion of the social authorities. There is a
well-meaning “big brother” state in Sweden and Norway, built on the values and
world views of the Social Democrats who have been in power in both countries
for very long periods of time8 ,
and authorities now rely on psychologists to guide them in decisions regarding
the well-being of people, and especially of children. Some of these cases are
non-controversial, as when a mother is severely addicted to drugs and earns her
income from prostitution, but many cases are more fuzzy and very difficult
decisions must be made.
Adele’s
case was misjudged from the beginning. She clearly was the victim of an abusive
man, and had for a long time been unable to break loose from him. This was a
threatening situation also for her son. She needed help, and asked for help in
the form of a new home, but such help was denied. Rather, steps were taken to
place her son in a new family and she herself was offered psychotherapy. It is
not known on what basis these decisions were made, but somewhat later a
psychologist entered the picture and delivered what amounted to a justification
of the strategy espoused by the authorities, now also towards the new child.
The
first lesson to learn from the case is this:
Avoid making irreversible decisions in very important
matters on the basis of a psychological assessment.
The decision in Adele’s case was not formally irreversible, and the thrust of
the law was in fact that parents and children should have help to make it
possible for them to live together, but for each passing week, and month, and
year, the decision became more and more difficult to change. The fact that
there were two different psychological assessments of Adele, and that they did
not agree, should also have made the authorities cautious. Granted, one of
these assessments had been commissioned by Adele herself, and hence was perhaps
not fully credible, but it takes little sophistication to realize that
psychologists who work for authorities may be affected, maybe unconsciously at
times, by a wish to serve the hand who feeds them. Clinical assessment in
forensic practice is full of uncertainties, unfortunately often hidden under a
surface of great confidence displayed by the responsible psychologist (Sjöberg,
1998-99, 2000-01).
The
second lesson is to be aware of the common tendency to
make too far reaching conclusions about personality, especially on the basis of
negative scenarios which are very easy to construct.
Someone with a background like Adele’s invites “psychologizing” - but while
some people do suffer from severe adjustment handicaps, they are relatively
few. The clinical psychologist or psychiatrist gains his or her experience in
an environment dominated by such clients, and the tendency to generalize to
normally adjusted people is at times only too strong. Research on resilience
and hardiness has, since the beginning of the 1980's, led to the conclusion
that many people do quite well in spite of very taxing surroundings, and that
we, as we grow older, indeed also tend to grow wiser. The base rate fallacy,
well document in judgement research (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982),
lures us to make much too confident conclusions about unusual states and
processes, such as severe mental illness. We have also a tendency to remember
only too well the few cases when such conclusions turned out to have been
called for, perhaps with disastrous consequences.
The
serious uncertainties of psychological theory and methods are ignored and
forgotten somewhere along the road. Psychologists construct scenarios and
interpretations, and it is a well known tendency that we believe in such
scenarios once we have constructed them ourselves (Tversky & Kahneman,
1982). Courts use similar thinking, and, finding that psychologists reinforce
their pre-conceived views, they tend to stick to them with even more
conviction.
Attachment
theory was very important in the present case, and it seems to have permeated
much of current practical work in clinical child psychology. Yet, contemporary
surveys of empirical work on the theory show that its validity is severely
limited and that some of its central tenets simply do not gain any empirical
backing, such as the notion of critical periods in development or the
importance and irreversibility of attachment to a few people (Belsky &
Cassidy, 1995).
Theory
is held in high regard in psychology and other behavioral and social sciences -
in my view, much too high (Sjöberg, 1999). Theory is a pillar of science, but
it is neither necessary nor sufficient for sound scientific applications. It
may well be sufficient to use a combination of principles gained from reading
research findings, own experience and common sense - and the general cultural
inheritance we profit from in reading good books, or seeing well conceived
movies or plays. These are all social constructions but that does not mean they
are all equally good or that anything goes. Too fast steps have been taken
towards theoretical speculations, and too much belief has been invested in
them. Attachment theory is a good example (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999). It
yields scientific credibility to what are often highly speculative
interpretations, which are then accepted by courts and authorities as if they
were the truth. But psychological theory is never the truth, only a set of
possible start-ups for further development.
The third lesson to be learned is therefore to trust
more in common sense, established general empirical principles and received
cultural knowledge - let psychological and psychiatric theory remain as the
darling of Academia but let it rest when it comes to the life and death matters
of justice.
Adele
was an outcast in society, a marginal person caught up in a quagmire of drug
abuse, crime and physical abuse. Her behavior was still defiant and she had,
and has, a strong will and strong sense of independence. What to make of such a
person? The risk of stigmatization is great. People who deviate, and especially
if they also behave in a provocative way, may be deprived of their rights
(Goffman, 1963), they become stigmatized. No matter how right they are, they
never seem to win in their fight against authorities. Their very persistence
creates further problems, since they - often quite correctly - point to real
injustice which has been done to them and their families.
The
fourth lesson is to avoid stigmatizing people, even
if they criticize us.
Finally,
a comment should be made on the use of psychology by judges. In Adele’s latest
trial, in the Oslo Appeals Court, one of the judges argued that the child had
developed attachment to the CPA authority. Nobody else argued that, to my
knowledge. Attachment to an authority? The most interesting thing about this
argument is that the judge apparently felt free to speculate wildly about
matters psychological. Instruments for such speculation are provided by dynamic
theory.
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Notes
1 . This is a
summary of a more extensive and detailed conference report (in Swedish) on the
case, which can be downloaded from http://www.dynam-it.com/forpsyk/, presented
in a conference at the Department of Psychology, University of Trondheim,
Norway, in November, 2001. The present article concentrates on the general
forensic psychology aspects of the case, and the many intricate legal problems
are deleted or treated only scantily. I am grateful for comments on this work
by professor David Brodzinsky, Rutgers University, professor Ann Frodi,
Linköping University, attorney Georg Kvande, Oslo, Dr. Michael Lamb, National
Institutes of Health, assistant professor Monica Martinussen, Tromsø
University, professor Paul E. Meehl, University of Minnesota, professor
Marianne Skånland, Bergen University , and docent Bo Vinnerljung, Department of
Social Work, Sweden. Their points of view have been of great value, but of
course I am alone responsible for the contents of the present paper.
2 . In
English “Paper dolls”.
3 . This
offer could, by itself, be an example of an important topic to analyse. Adele’s
problems were interpreted as residing in herself, and not amenable to a
solution by external means, e.g. economic support to find housing. The
authorities’ strategy reminds me of how employees at the public housing agency
in Stockholm, unable to help people to get the needed housing, turn to “talk cures”.
Psychology is thus used to hide problems which cannot be solved without
important re-allocations of economic resources in society, or changed
legislation and the use of a market economy for housing.
4 . This is a
rough estimate, of course, and is based on an estimate of the money paid to the
foster parents over time, but more importantly, the costs of all the
investigations and court trials that have been called for in the case.
5. Among the many legal subtleties of the
case is the argument that the European Court is in principle superordinate to
Norwegian courts and authorities, and that its decisions have a binding effect.
However, obviously this is not the interpretation made in practice in Norway in
the present case. Sweden has, like Norway, several times lost cases in the
European Court but there are few signs that Swedish practice is being affected
by such court cases. There have also been settlements where Sweden has avoided
losing a case by paying small sums of money to parents. The situation is
similar in Norway.
6 . This
discussion is limited to those kinds of applications. Dynamic psychology was
construed with different applications in focus, in clinical practice, and the
present discussion is not necessarily relevant with regard to them.
7 Hitchcock was one of the first to exploit this possibility
in a very skilful and persuasive manner, followed in the 1990's by scores of
Hollywood tales of serial killers who had been subjected to sexual abuse in
their childhoods. It seems likely that these cleverly made up stories create
beliefs, in the public, that such things do happen in real life and that the
explanations for them are psychodynamic and developmental.
8 . In
Adele Johansen vs Norway: A mother fighting for her child.
By Lennart Sjöberg
(pdf)
Destroying the Family: Swedish style
A family flees from the Welfare State