Ottosson’s work relies heavily on the mid-twentieth-century
American psychologist Howard Searles. Best known for his insights
into the idea of transference during psychoanalysis (in which the
patient projects feelings onto the therapist), Searles also recognized
that nature could provide useful objects of transference. Searles
worked at a rural mental hospital in Maryland, where he witnessed
this firsthand, writing, “The nonhuman environment, far from being
of little or no account to human personality development, constitutes
one of the most basically important ingredients of human
psychological existence. . . . Over recent decades we have come from
dwelling in another world in which the living works of nature either
predominated or were near at hand, to dwelling in an environment
dominated by a technology which is wondrously powerful and yet
nonetheless dead.” And that was in 1960.
I visited Ottosson at his campus office in Alnarp. At sixty-three,
he has Parkinson’s disease and continues to rely on assistants for
reading and writing. As he talked, his upper body snaked gently from
side to side. He gives talks all over Sweden and is amazed by how
many people tell him similar stories of recovery in nature. But it
pains him that the modern medical establishment has largely
forgotten the insights of Rush and Searles. “When you built a hospital
a hundred years ago, you built it around a nice park. That was self-
evident. But after about after 1930 or 1940, man is treated like a
machine. He gets energy and medicine and that’s all. We are just now
starting to get fuller knowledge back.”
Down the hall from Ottosson in the great historical castle-like
building of the landscaping department sits the office of Patrik Grahn,
the man responsible for Sweden’s nascent renaissance of “horticulture
therapy,” or using plant cultivation and garden settings as a healing
strategy. And the man who inspired him? Ottosson. Grahn wasn’t
starting from nowhere. As a landscape architect, he’d met the Kaplans
in Michigan in the early 1990s, and soon afterward studied the