”Det enklaste; naturligaste och riktigaste sättet”: 1950-talsexpertis i diskussion inför etableringen av svensk familjerådgivning

Abstract

”The simplest, most natural, and correct way”: Expertise in Sweden’s debate about official family counselling

In this article we investigate how divorce in 1950s Sweden was conceptualised not primarily as a private failure but as a threat to social cohesion, and how family counselling emerged as a key institutional response. We drawn on a rich source material: articles and other texts by the staff of the Stockholm Family Counselling Bureau between 1952 and 1959; the archives of the official inquiry into family counselling, which reported in 1957; and the Swedish Medical Association’s responses to the inquiry’s work.

Using Donileen Loseke’s constructionist model of social problems, we trace how claims-makers – including the Stockholm Family Counselling Bureau, the Swedish Medical Association, and individual psychiatrists and social workers – defined the grounds, diagnosis, and solution to the "divorce problem". The grounds were sought in a combination of statistical analyses of rising divorce rates and a moralising history of social disintegration. The diagnosis located the cause in psychological maladjustment brought on by modernisation and women’s changing roles. The solution was framed as a psycho-scientific intervention, above all one that was individualised.

The initial ideal of an inter-professional collaboration between social workers and physicians gradually gave way to turf wars over scientific authority, jurisdiction, and institutional control. Although the causes of marital breakdown were located in societal transformation, interventions increasingly targeted individuals – typically women – with ego-psychological therapy. This therapeutic individualisation was consolidated in the 1960 government Bill that nationalised family counselling.

We argue that the psycho-scientific expertise served as a non-authoritarian technology of governance: a means to normalise the nuclear family and contain the gendered consequences of modernisation under the guise of care and adjustment. At the same time, early feminist voices in the counselling profession and the press problematised the same norms, paving the way for later debates about autonomy and equality. By linking professional practice to broader projects such as welfare state regulation and gendered citizenship, we offer a historically grounded explanation for why individualised therapy – rather than couples counselling or social reform – came to define Swedish family counselling in the post-war period.