Svaghetsegoism : Om Andreas Bjerres kriminalpsykologi i Thorsten Jonssons novellsamling Fly till vatten och morgon

The paper examines Thorsten Jonsson’s Fly till vatten och morgon (Flee to water and morning, 1941), a short story collection based on material from real criminal cases, reported in newspaper articles and investigation records. Special attention is given to the connections between Jonsson’s short stories and the criminal psychology of Andreas Bjerre, an intertextual relation highly neglected by earlier scholars. Jonsson studied Bjerre’s psychological theories while working on a monograph on the prose writer Martin Koch. The discussion of the paper focuses on five intertextual areas. Firstly, it is argued that the characters in Jonsson’s short stories in their construction are founded on Bjerre’s psychological classification of criminals. Secondly, it is demonstrated that Bjerre’s conception of the paradigmatic criminal had an analogous influence on Jonsson’s characterization. Thirdly, drawing on Bjerre’s ethics, the paper analyzes the collection’s moral approach to criminality. Fourthly, some intertextual correspondences are shown between Jonsson’s social discourse and Bjerre’s criticism of the European judicial and penal apparatus. Fifthly and finally, the paper points out that some of the collection’s most effective narrative devices are inspired by Bjerre’s interview method, invented by him for the purpose of revealing self-deception of criminals