Karin Johannisson showed how culture shapes the body – the Swedish newspaper svenska Dagbladet

Karin Johannisson was 72 years of age. Photo: Magnus Hjalmarson Neideman

Karin Johannissons educational act gave new insights on how society characterizes the human body. She stated how the view of women, limit their room for manoeuvre.

As a spränglärd mix of the humanist and scientist, she has närgranskat us for many decades now. Our tears, our sadness, our illnesses, our homesickness, our madness, our anxiety, our genitals, the borders of our normality… She has shown that the human body is inextricably linked with the society.

Karin Johannisson was born in 1944 in Lund, sweden, and came to be one of our most popular and acclaimed idea – and lärdomshistoriker, with transformative works such as "The dark continent", "Melancholy room" and "The wounded divan".

I, Myself, came into contact with her already in high school, when I read her essay "the Body’s thin shell. Six essays about body, history and culture" (1997), with case studies from the 1700 – and 1800-century.

Above all, it was the chapter "the Body’s theater: the Girls ‘ foolishness," I got hooked on, the thing that strikes me when I am almost 20 years later, the scroll of the book. Where she shows galenskapens different expressions and put into the "contemporary" självskadebeteenden, as anorexia, in a historical perspective. With a sure pen for us tilllbaka, as she would often do, but shows us in addition – in an ingenious way – how to present all of the time there, even if it usually is cleverly unspoken.

She gave the insight about how much both our body and soul are affected by the spirit of the times and society. It came to be one of her characteristics.

Despite the fact that she is not just made the man a bit more understandable, but also a bit more complicated, it was a kind of consolation. I had as a 19-year-old rarely experienced something so fresh, thought-provoking. The book was significant for me in the same way as other feminist books that were published then, as Nina björk’s "Under the pink blanket".

Through several of the forthcoming works and in kulturartiklar did Karin Johannisson a feminist act. She showed how women’s emotions and bodies are reflections of the society we are living in now.

Karin Johannisson expressed himself that it was important for her to reach outside the academic world. She succeeded.

But she also said that she did not see herself as a science writer. As well as in the interviews it has been implied that she as an individual did not pass by the small talk was her books are never filled with fluff in order to sell some additional books. She took with readers in their own exploration, made it seem so easy at the same time that we noticed how much expertise and referring to other heavy thinkers, how much ever thought, that droned in the lines.

It was as if Karin Johannisson for each book not only expanded their theories, but also the way she expressed them. She was a conscious stylist. It is not noticeable at least in "The wounded divan: if the psyche’s aesthetics," which came out in the autumn of 2015 and was her first book.

With it, which meant even a Augustprisnominering, she stopped at the top. Dagbladet’s reviewer, psykiatriprofessorn Johan Cullberg, thought that the book should be compulsory reading for specialists in psychiatry.

on the Basis of medical records about the artist Sigrid Hjertén and the author Agnes von Krusenstjerna, and Nelly Sachs reflects her captivating how women’s "madness". She describes such things as how psychiatric diagnoses paradoxically can provide a kind of freedom, that women can thus get rid of the demands of society and thus have a larger space to move in than the tight as they are confined to.

Karin Johannisson wrote the basis of the women’s room for manoeuvre, and the theories in "The wounded divan" in one of his last kulturartiklar, in september of the year in DN Culture. With his constant pregnans analyzed she how Hillary Clinton is portrayed in the media, and what little flexibility she has. Interesting, she set it in relation to how a number of women 1900-writers such produced themselves to reach higher "male" intellectual status, among other things, by becoming as thin as possible. "The expresses that the soul requires more nutrients than the body. They portray themselves as thinkers rather than as svältare", she developed.

Karin Johannisson went away in the aftermath of a brain tumor, a mere 72 years old. It is a great loss. One would only wish that she had been allowed to continue their exploration. With its röntgenblick for the present and the past, and man’s innermost self, she put us all into a context, took what we feel seriously.