The Sunflower residential care home is where Jeanette Kihlberg visits the older Sofia Zetterlund to ask about Victoria’s past. The visit places an uneasy, investigative conversation inside a managed care setting: Jeanette and Sofia talk in the dayroom, smoke despite staff rules, and are discovered by the manager and a nurse bringing Sofia her medication.

Setting and Arrival

Jeanette stubs out her cigarette before ringing the bell at the Sunflower residential care home. After a brief conversation with the manager, she is shown to the dayroom, where she meets the older Sofia. The care home’s ordinary routines frame the encounter: staff oversee the visit, and Sofia’s medication is due while the conversation is in progress.

The Visit

Jeanette uses the meeting to ask what happened to Victoria in Copenhagen and whether Sofia remembers what a letter said. The questions lead into a discussion of Victoria’s abuse and the possibility that a dissociated personality might repeat that abuse by tormenting itself. Sofia connects this possibility to Freud’s account of moral masochism, describing the risk that an untreated part of Victoria could act like her father and punish her from within. The care home thus becomes a place where personal history is examined in clinical terms, but through a direct and increasingly intimate exchange rather than a formal interview.

Staff, Rules, and Narrative Role

The visit lasts long enough for Jeanette and Sofia each to smoke five cigarettes. They are caught by the manager and a nurse who has come to give Sofia her medication; Jeanette leaves ten minutes later, after receiving a reprimand. The episode gives the home a precise double function: it is both a supervised institution with routines and authority figures, and a temporary refuge for a conversation that Jeanette could not conduct at a distance. The cigarettes mark the informality—and the breach of rules—through which the account of Victoria’s past emerges.