Esther Lamm

Esther Lamm, (9 August 1913 in Stockholm – 28 February 1989 in Stockholm), was a Swedish child and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who became involved in refugee relief. After World War II, she treated concentration camp survivors who arrived at the Stockholm hospital by ship and ambulance.

During the 1930s, Esther Lamm studied medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm specializing in psychiatry and graduated as a medical doctor in 1945 with high marks. She was present at the Karolinska Institute on 9 February 1939 and was among those who voted for the right of ten Jewish doctors to come to Sweden and practice their profession but she was forbidden to speak at the meeting.

In addition, the Lamm family also cared for Jewish refugees in their parents' home on Skeppsbron in the Old Town as well as in their own home on the island of Kungsholmen.

Personal life In 1936, Lamm married the child psychiatrist Gustav Jonsson (1907–1994), who was an early advocate of anti-authoritarian child rearing. Both belonged to a circle of socialist doctors who united in the struggle for sexual education and the reception of refugees from Nazi Germany, among other things. Their son Staffan was born in 1937, followed the next year by their daughter Annika. The family lived in Stockholm's first collective house at John Ericssonsgatan 6 on Kungsholmen. The neighbors included many of the socially interested doctors and social scientists who were working to build a new Swedish people's home according to radical ideals. The building had a central kitchen with a food elevator for each apartment. A maid came to clean for those who wanted that service, and on the ground floor, there was a kindergarten run by the Danish child psychologist Nancy Bratt. Lamm and Jonsson divorced in 1943.

In his autobiography, Boken om mig (2000), cinematographer Staffan Lamm described his childhood as "insecure, despite all good intentions." Esther Lamm's personal notes about her psychiatric work with women after World War II became the basis for Staffan's short film Sara in 1999.

In 1950, Esther Lamm married again, this time to the engineer Rudolf Holmdahl (1912–1986) and they had a son Martin Holmdahl-Lamm born in 1951.