Frederik van Eeden

Biography

Frederik Willem van Eeden (1860–1932) was a late 19th-century and early 20th-century Dutch writer and psychiatrist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers and the Significs Group, and had top billing among the editors of De Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide) during its celebrated first few years of publication. He was widely admired in the Netherlands for his acclaimed novels, poetry, plays, and essays, as well as his status as the first internationally prominent Dutch psychiatrist. In 1880 he studied Medicine in Amsterdam, where he pursued a bohemian lifestyle and wrote poetry. Whilst living in the city, he coined the term lucid dream, nowadays is a much busied term in Dream study. Van Eeden incorporated his psychiatric insights into his writings, such as in his psychological novel "Van de koele meren des doods" ("The Deeps of Deliverance"). Published in 1900, the novel intimately traced the struggle of a woman addicted to morphine as she deteriorated physically and mentally.