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Betty Huse Memorial Lecture Award for 2011
The Healing Power of
Wild Strawberries
Barbara Young, M.D.
Wild Strawberries,
a
film by the Swedish artist Ingmar Bergman, is the story of one day
in the life of an elderly doctor as he returns to his medical school
where he is to receive an honorary degree on his 50th
anniversary. The film flows from his lonely life to his dreams,
memories and reveries; returning to a life enriched by the
happenings of the day. Bergman often said: “I want audiences to
feel, to sense my films. This …is much more important than
their understanding them.”
When you take the time to watch this incomparable film, I suggest
you approach it as though you are listening to Beethoven’s Opus 111
piano sonata. You won’t understand the details of the artists’ lives
which they are revisiting, but, in their creations, you will deeply
experience their painful longing, their hurt and rage at betrayal,
their guilt and regrets, their fear of death, and, at the end, a
sober resurrection. As
Bergman wrote, “Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes
beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our
emotions, deep into the twilight room of our souls.”
***
Wild Strawberries
(1957) is one of the two most discussed of Ingmar Bergman’s films.
It is hard to believe that he was only 37 when it was
composed, so deeply does he identify with the elderly Prof. Isac
Borg, played by the actor and film director Victor Sjöström. Ingrid
Thulin, in the role of his son’s wife Marianne, and Bibi Andersson
who plays both Saras, were members of Bergman’s loyal troupe of
actors formed when he was directing the Malmö City Theater from 1952
to1959.
***
The psychopathology of our main character is self-evident.
However, rather than approaching the film from a
psychodynamic point of view, I plan to emphasize the coping
mechanisms employed by the characters in the film as well as the
glimpses we are given of those of Bergman himself; both as a child
of genius in a harsh environment, and an extremely creative but
tormented man. We will hear of coping mechanisms we all make use of
in order to get through the trials and tribulations we encounter. We
will see that some of those early coping mechanisms we used that
were essential to us as children, can seriously handicap us in the
full unfolding of our lives.
Prof. Isac Borg’s way of dealing with the adversity of his childhood
by withdrawing into himself, had led to the betrayal by his fiancée
and by his wife, had produced a cold obsessive compulsive son, and
resulted in a disgruntled personality who pushed people away and
left him lonely and terrified of his approaching death. And we will
discover that the creating of films had been a vital coping
mechanism in Ingmar Bergman’s survival of his own very difficult
childhood and in dealing with the subsequent anxieties and
psychosomatic illness with which he suffered most of his life. Since
Wild Strawberries is so
specifically autobiographical, as I summarize the film I will
occasionally step aside and call these parallels to your attention.
One way of looking at the film is to think of the events occurring
during the long auto trip to Lund as symbolic of the professor’s
life. Marianne, his daughter-in-law, is both a silent observer and
that part of Isak Borg
which represents his conscience. She confronts him
straightforwardly: “You are a hurtful, mean old man!” The
hitchhiking children represent the few happy times he had
experienced as a child. The quarreling sadomasochistic couple
represent his quarreling parents, whom he “gets even” with by
permitting Marianne to put them out of the car. The unexpected
company on the drive brings about subtle changes in his personality.
At the end of the film, as the professor goes to sleep, his heart
has been truly warmed by the children’s loving serenade. He speaks
kindly, somewhat seductively, to his housekeeper, and puts himself
to sleep with a fantasy of his father and mother happily together.
The time has come to cease being angry with his parents and
to make the most of the life he has left.
***
Now let us look in some detail at the events of the day. Retired
Prof. Borg, age 76, keeps to himself. He is essentially alone. He
has a crotchety distance-producing relationship with Miss Agda, his
housekeeper of 40 years.
We, the audience, are to be his companions on this long drive. He
speaks directly to us, telling us the nightmare that had awakened
him at three in the morning. We psychoanalysts think of most anxiety
dreams as wish fulfillments. As the story unfolds we’ll see that
even this terrifying nightmare served a positive purpose.
In the dream, he has gone out for his customary morning stroll.
Though it is a sunny day, he feels chilled. There are no people, no
vehicles. It is frighteningly silent. As he passes the oculist’s
shop, he sees that the hands have fallen off the face of the huge
clock, and someone had bashed in the eyes on the glasses sign so
they look like infected sores.
He checks his watch and sees that its hands are missing as well.
When he finds watch still ticking, his heart races in frenzy. Is he
actually dying? Terrified, Isak rushes up to a lone man for help.
But when he touches his shoulder, he is confronted by a rubbery
distorted face, The man collapses, his head falls off and blood
pours out into the street. An ancient hearse with two horses but no
driver rattles by. A wheel rolls off and almost smashes the dreamer
against the wall. The coffin falls out onto the street and breaks
open.
The hand of the corpse
reaching up to him is his own!
In senseless horror, he awakes.
It takes him time to come back to reality; to realize that he
actually is still alive.—It was just a dream!—Yet in some way, the
dream has sent him the urgent message that he
must drive his car to Lund.
We ask ourselves, what does he fear about this trip that set off the
nightmare? What will he be revisiting in Lund that he feels will be
too painful to bear? He is returning to the land where he grew up.
He will be seeing his 96-year-old mother who is a cold and lonely
woman. This is also the world where he was betrayed by his fiancée
and his wife.
However, it is also the world where he was in family practice for
many years. When his former patient, the gas station attendant,
greets him warmly, he realizes sadly that his life might have been
very different if he had remained in this community of people who
loved and appreciated him.
Perhaps the nightmare is also an admonition that it is not too late
to change, for when he wakes he knows he must drive rather than be
shepherded on the plane like a child by his housekeeper.
He will prove to himself that
he is still in charge of his life; that he is still very much alive!
***
We ask ourselves, what had happened before the dream that had given
this solitary elderly man the courage and strength to have the dream
that would catapult him back into the life of the living?
We know that he was capable of change because he had enjoyed
his medical career in the country. Perhaps it was Marianne’s visit
to his home that had stirred the memory of his loving relationship
with his fiancée Sara before his brother stepped in—whom he had lost
because of his fear of, and his defenses against intimacy.
The coping mechanisms he had needed to survive a cold and
painful childhood had made impossible the adult flowering of his
ability to love. Marianne’s presence may well have sparked a latent
fire.
Dreams are a ubiquitous part of our coping mechanism system. We are
forced to see things we don’t want consciously to see. The eerie
lighting of Isak’s dream could be a visual representation of that
part of him which is saying, “You’re
going to see and face what you need to face whether you like it or
not!” The eyes that are festering sores could be the resistant
part of his mind battling back, “I
won’t see! I won’t face the fact that I am going to die; and that I
have been a mean man out of my unhappiness.” The mind that still
hopes says, “I want to change. Help me find the way!”
When the professor awakes, he has no grasp of this battle that has
taken place inside himself. All he knows is that it had been a
terrifying dream. But the dream has been successful. He has his
solution. By driving alone, he will have time to contemplate why he
is so anxious so he can enjoy this return to his native ground. He
might even be pushed by the dream to face up to the fact that his
solution to his pains by isolating himself and driving people away
has been too costly. He
has been more dead than alive!
***
As he is eating breakfast, Marianne asks if she can accompany him in
order to return to her husband. As they drive along the highway, we
see the professor’s unpleasant rejecting personality in action. But
Marianne is a match for him. She tells him he is a selfish, ruthless
old man hiding behind his old-fashioned charm and friendliness. She
doesn’t like him. She feels sorry him. Even his son hates him.—This
verbal battle delights the professor and the air begins to clear.
He turns off the road to show her the old house where he and his
nine brothers and sisters had stayed in the summers. Marianne
disappears and Isak relives the memory from his youth of watching
his fiancée Sara as she is picking wild strawberries being seduced
by his older brother.
She tells Sigfrid that he, Isak, is fishing with Father. Isak turns
aside and tells us: “I felt a secret and completely inexplicable
happiness at this message.” (Here bursts through our story Bergman’s
childhood longing for a companionable and loving relationship with
his Lutheran minister father who was frequently cold, rigid and
physically and emotionally abusive, all in the name of God.) As we
hear Sara’s conversation with her cousin, we learn what Isak was
like as a young man before he had hardened himself against the
painful sadness of rejection. “He is so refined and moral and
sensitive and he wants to read poetry together and he talks about
the after-life and wants to play duets on the piano and he likes to
kiss only in the dark and he talks about sinfulness.” On learning
that Isak had once been a sensitive person, I begin to have hope
that this lonely old man is still capable of change.
As Isak awakes from this reverie, he is startled by the appearance
of a young woman also called Sara. They immediately begin a
delightful banter. She is not put off by the dignity of his age or
his reserved manner. He
is delighted by her happy spirit, her self-possession. She and her
two young men companions hitchhike a ride as they make their way
south toward Italy.
Just as a spirit of playfulness and warmth has taken over the
passengers, they crash into a car driving on the wrong side of the
road because a couple is engaged in a violent argument. Rescued by
the professor, they continue to quarrel in Isak’s car with no
respect for their good Samaritans.
The husband explains. “This is my way of enduring. I ridicule
my wife and she ridicules me…. But we need each other’s company.
It’s only out of pure selfishness that we haven’t murdered each
other by now.” His wife slaps his face.
Marianne, who is now driving, speaks up. ‘We have three children in
the car and for their sake may I ask the lady and the gentleman to
get out.” Here Bergman, through the film, expresses
his feelings toward his
own parents. If only someone like Marianne had been there to stop
his parents from quarreling, and his father from beating his
children and humiliating them, damaging them for the rest of their
lives!
The sojourners have lunch together outside an inn. It is clear that
Isak is recovering his old warm loving self with these young people
who truly respect and value him. He starts to recite a poem exposing
his own loneliness and expressing his appreciation for his new
friends: “Where is the friend I seek everywhere? Dawn is the time of
loneliness and care…When twilght comes I am still yearning.”
(a psalm by J O Wallin, a 19th century Swedish
theologian) To his
surprise, Marianne and the hitchhikers carry on the poem.
As they approach Lund, Isak doses off. He has a very disturbing
“examination” dream. We are all familiar with these dreams. They are
so painful it is hard to see how they can possibly be wish
fulfillments. And yet, in a way, they are. And we profit from them.
Because of the warmth and love Isak has experienced in his
relationship with Marianne and the children, he is being reassured
by this terrifying nightmare. In the dream, he is being quizzed by
the husband whom they had left standing on the highway.
He is asked to identify bacteria under the microscope. All he
can see is his own eye staring back at him. —“What is the first duty
of a doctor?”—He can’t remember and is seriously flustered. The
stern examiner tells him that the answer is “to ask for
forgiveness.”— He has been accused of callousness, selfishness, and
ruthlessness by his wife—the very things he has been accusing
himself of.
The examiner then leads him to the woods where he witnesses his
long-dead wife with another man in a field. First the man threatens
and attacks her and then they make love. As she straightens her hair
she laughs at Isak. She describes to her lover how Isak would have
reacted when she confessed her infidelity. “I…know exactly what he
will say: ‘Poor little girl, how I pity you.’ As if he were God
himself…. ‘I feel infinitely sorry for you.
You shouldn’t ask forgiveness from me. I have nothing to
forgive.’ But he doesn’t mean a word of it, because he is completely
cold. And then he’ll suddenly be very tender and I’ll yell at him
that he’s not really sane…and then I’ll say that it’s his fault that
I am the way I am, and then he’ll look very sad and will say that he
is to blame….” The examiner declares that the penalty for Isak’s
behavior is Loneliness.
How can this complex dream be reassuring? First of all, that he will
get through the formal ceremony about which he is anxious; just as
he had passed his exams in medical school 50 years before. But, more
profoundly, “You did survive your parents’ separation when it felt
as though the bottom had dropped out of your world. You did survive
the betrayal by your fiancée and your wife.
Now be reassured that,
even at your age, it is safe to dare to love again.”
***
When Isak wakes, Marianne is now willing to listen to his dream; to
his pain. He says, “It’s as if
I’m trying to say something to myself which I don’t want to hear
when I’m awake….That I’m dead, although I live.”
Perhaps the dream has led him to recognize that he is not the
only one who was betrayed; that it had been his withholding
personality which had pushed the young
women away. He was indeed as guilty as they.
Marianne’s face grows dark and serious. She tells Isak that Evald,
her husband and his son, says the same thing about himself. She
describes his reaction when she had finally told him she was
pregnant.. “…It’s ridiculous to populate this world with new victims
and it’s most absurd of all to believe that they will have it any
better than us…
Personally I was an unwelcome child in a marriage that was a nice
imitation of hell. Is the old man really sure that I’m his son?
Indifference, fear, infidelity and guilt feelings —those were my
nurses….” Here again Bergman is putting his own thoughts into
Evald’s mouth.
Isak asks Marianne why she has told him about this. She says, “When
I saw you together with your mother, I was gripped by a strange
fear…Here is a very ancient woman, completely ice-cold… And here is
her son, and there are light-years of distance between them….And
Evald is on the verge of becoming just as lonely and cold—and dead.
And then I thought, there is only coldness and death…Somewhere it
must end.” She has decided she is going to have her child. No one is
going to take it from her!
When they arrive in Lund, Agda, his housekeeper, is curt with
Isak—he has ruined the most important day of her life—but he is
pleased to see her and surprised to feel a great warmth toward her.
The long tedious ceremony is finally over. Exhausted, he avoids the
banquet and is helped to bed by Miss Agda. He repents his morning’s
utterances and asks forgiveness. He suggests that they speak less
formally to each other.
She declines but says, with a sly smile, “You know where I am if you
should want something.”
The children appear under his window and serenade him. Young Sara
says, “Goodbye, Father Isak. Do you know that it is really you I
love, today, tomorrow and forever?”
To calm himself so he can sleep, he recalls memories of his
childhood. He was back at the wild strawberry patch. The children
were playing. But he can’t find either his father or mother.
Down at the beach he saw his father fishing. His mother was
sitting on the bank reading a book. “I tried to shout to them but
not a word came from my mouth. Then my father…lifted his hand and
waved, laughing. My mother looked up from her book. She also laughed
and nodded. I dreamed that I stood by the water and shouted toward
the bay, but the warm summer breeze carried away my cries and they
did not reach their destination. Yet I wasn’t sorry about that; I
felt, on the contrary, rather light hearted.” (As long as his
parents are happy together, he can cease keeping his eye on them and
is free to enjoy his life.)
***
How interesting it is that Bergman ends Isak’s journey with this
fantasy-discovery of his absent but happy parents. Marianne and he
had worked through their relationship from negative to positive. The
quarreling couple had been evicted from the car. He had been warmed
by the playful, loving engagement with the hitchhiking children. A
shift had occurred in his aloofness with his housekeeper and with
his son. Filled with the recovery of love, Isak is no longer
obsessed with death, and can put himself to sleep with the fantasy
and wish that his parents could have been as fortunate. Isak’s wish
that his parents had been happy together was Bergman’s wish as well.
***
In looking back on Wild
Strawberries, Bergman later said: “I had created a figure who on
the outside, looked like my father but was me through and
through…cut off from all human emotions.” It was Bergman himself who
was the loner. So it behooves us to look at Bergman’s life as it was
at the age of 37 when he created this film; as his life had been as
a child; and as his life was to become in the future. In the
process, we will observe the major coping mechanisms this very
gifted child and man had made use of in the face of a severe sense
of inferiority and vulnerability, and daily struggles with the
demons of anxiety, severe gastrointestinal problems and outbursts of
violent temper.
Bergman, at 37, was at the beginning of the height of his skill as a
film creator. He has just finished
The Seventh Seal.
Wild Strawberries was to be a lighter film with a happier ending,
though he later said he didn’t think it was actually possible for a
person like Isak to change. Here he was no doubt expressing his
discouragement with his own life of suffering which had not
diminished despite his success as a theater director and the close
community of actors he had formed around him—a loving family for
most of the hours of the day and
night. Recently separated from his third wife, he said, “It
is a strange experience to love someone with whom you could
absolutely not live.” His intimate relationship with the actress
Bibi Andersson, who played both Saras in the film, was crumbling.
And he was feuding bitterly with his parents. “... Mother and I
tried time and again for a temporary reconciliation, but there were
too many skeletons in our closets, too many poisonous
misunderstandings .…I tried to put myself in my father’s place and
sought explanations for the bitter quarrels with my mother. I was
quite sure I had been an unwanted child, growing out of a cold womb,
one whose birth resulted in a crisis [in their marriage]…” He later
realized that through Wild
Strawberries he was pleading with his parents: “see me,
understand me, and, if possible, forgive me. …”
Bergman had always had stomach troubles and when in the army at 19
he was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer and discharged.
At 36, he was waking at 4:30 every morning with his gut
churning. During a two-month hospital stay, the doctors sought the
source of his severe gastrointestinal symptoms of constipation,
abdominal pain and explosive diarrhea so severe that he sometimes
“shit in his trousers.” The doctors concluded that his illness was
psychosomatic and told him he would have to start looking seriously
into this “dimly-lit area, the border country between body and soul.” While in the hospital,
his intellectual curiosity, his creativity and his rigid
self-discipline helped keep him in balance. It was here in the
isolation of his hospital room that he wrote
Wild Strawberries.
That a man with such severe suffering could create a film so
cohesive, imaginative, visually beautiful, and psychologically sound
is a miracle: a miracle of the genius. This gift of creativity had
saved him as a child and was saving him now. But genius is not
enough. It has to be fed by love. His mother had no milk. Dying from
inanition, his maternal grandmother had carried him all day by train
to her summer home, keeping him alive with sponge cake soaked in
water. Here he was mothered by his grandmother, her housekeeper and
friend Lalla, and a wet nurse from the village.
We don’t know at what age he returned to his own mother. Suffering
with separation anxiety, he was “deeply in love” with and in need of
her, but she pushed him away when he clung to her, rationalizing her
behavior with the advice of a prominent pediatrician. The little boy
was very angry with her when, at four, he was put out of her bed
because of the birth of his sister. Naturally he and his older
brother resented this intruder. However, they did not ask when the
baby was going back to where he came from. They did not fantasy how
they could get rid of her. They actually attempted to kill her. The
brother encouraged him to choke her but he pressed on her chest.
Fortunately, their attempt was not successful.
Though the boys were eight and four, it is apparent that
their love from and for their mother was so ambiguous and
inconsistent they had not been able to reach a stage of object
constancy that would have inhibited this active expression of their
murderous rage. The lack
of an automatic inhibition of aggression was to plague Bergman most
of his life in the form of violent outbursts of temper when his
wishes were threatened or denied.
Ingmar was aware of the serious tension between his parents caused
in part by the fact that his mother was in love with another man.
Feeling the insecurity of his parents’ relationship must have been
terrifying to this sensitive child. Was this lack of trust in a
permanent relationship responsible for Bergman’s five marriages? Did
he leave his wives and mistresses before they could leave him
because of his clingy and rageful behavior? Silence, in particular,
was unbearable, reminding him of the silent days he had suffered
when being punished as a child. It was his mother who had made him
wear his sister’s red dress all day when he had wet the bed.
Humiliation was even more damaging to him than the harsh beatings
and forced apologies demanded by his pastor father in the name of
God. He lived in fear of his father’s brutal outbursts, but he
thrived on the rare private times they had together as he
accompanied him on the bicycle when they traveled to outlying
parishes and stopped to swim and fish.
How did this little boy thrive and continue to mature under these
difficult circumstances? He was exposed to the theater and films by
his grandmother, with whom he spent every summer.
He and his sister put on puppet shows; he reciting all the
parts. Another of his coping mechanisms was ingenuity. After being
confined to a dark cupboard as punishment, he hid a flashlight in
the cupboard. When his brother was given a primitive film projector,
he threw a tantrum because film was
his interest; his brother
played war games. So he came up with the brilliant idea of trading
half of his lead soldiers for the magic lantern. By making friends
with the projectionist, he was able to attend the movie theater
frequently at no cost.
In his early twenties—when he felt he could survive by himself—and
irritated with his father’s discouragement of his passion for
becoming a theater and film director, all his suppressed and
repressed rage rose to the surface. He stood up to his controlling
father, knocking him across the room and slapping his mother when
she tried to intervene. He then walked out the door. His siblings
were suffering too. His brother tried to commit suicide and his
sister was forced into an abortion out of consideration for the
family reputation.
As an adult, Bergman worked all the time, directing theater in a
number of different cities. The films were shot in the summer in
order to give work to his loyal group of actors. His mind was always
busy with ideas for the next film. His intense drive and
determination were coping mechanisms for getting through life and
for keeping his demons at bay. (He was well aware that at least one
of the demons lived within himself because he would draw a little
stick-figure of the devil after his signature.) He was compulsive
about organizing his day; making use of the traits of orderliness
and discipline he had learned from his precise and demanding father.
As time passed, his films became more complex. Like all artists, he
was drawing on information from his childhood as a foundation for
his films as well as making use of his present day conflicts and
agonies. Over a period
of more than 50 years of making films he went through adolescent
rebellion, the struggles between man and woman who eventually
conclude that “Hell together is better than Hell alone,” his
religious conflicts—is there a God?—life’s emptiness, the fear of
disintegration, and finally—after his parents’ death—an open
expression of violence as though it was finally safe to shout to the
world, “This is how it really was!” The remarkable thing is that as
he projected these pains and terrors into his audience, he himself
got better. By gradually resolving and ridding himself of his
demons, he was—intuitively—conducting his own psychoanalysis. A few
years before his parents died, there was an uneasy reconciliation.
Later he reflected, “My mother and father were transformed into
human beings of normal proportions, and the infantile, bitter hatred
was dissolved and disappeared. And then we were able to meet in a
mood of affection and mutual understanding.” And after four failed
marriages and a number of liaisons, he had grown enough to establish
and maintain a peaceful marriage.
At the age of 58, an extreme circumstance put to the test Bergman’s
ability to survive. While he was in the middle of a rehearsal, tax
officials appeared and carried him off to the station where he was
charged with tax fraud. The humiliation was so great he seriously
dissociated. “…In the
sharp light, a few metres away, I saw myself as standing and looking
at myself. …I was
standing on the yellow rug looking at myself sitting in the chair.
…I was sitting in the chair looking at myself standing on the yellow
rug. … I could hear myself wailing.”
He put himself in the Karolinka psychiatric clinic where he
was snowed under with five Valium a day …. “Every morning, I walked
for an hour in the park, the shadow of an eight-year-old beside me;
it was both stimulating and uncanny.”
Gradually his extraordinary defense mechanisms came into play. “I
went on the attack against the demons with a method that had worked
well in previous crises. I divided the day and the night into
definite units of time, each of which was filled with activities
organized beforehand, alternating with periods of rest. Only by
rigidly following my day and night programme could I maintain my
sanity against [violent] torments…. I returned to planning and
staging my life with great care.… The attack of the tax officials
actually managed to do something neither psychiatry nor myself had
been able to achieve during my two months’ illness….I was so
furiously angry that I recovered immediately. The horror and sense
of…humiliation I had been suffering from day and night evaporated
within a few hours and have never been heard of since….”
He and his wife went into self-imposed exile in Germany where he
directed plays and made two films. After eight years he returned to
Sweden and lived on the island of Fårö, where he had made a number
of films and had built a home.
Though he had had no psychotherapy that we know of, through
the self-exploration he had undergone in the creating of his films,
he had discovered some secret elixir that enabled him to overcome
his terror of intimacy. He and his fifth wife, Ingrid, were married
24 years before she died of cancer. Bergman felt, rightfully so,
that he had been a failure as a father to his eight children. Now
all the children came to their home for celebrations and got to know
each other. All but one followed him into similar creative fields.
Ingmar Junior became an airplane captain.
Bergman lived 10 years after Ingrid’s death. As he said in an
interview when he was 80, “Her death was a blow to my will, my very
existence, my reality, a total catastrophe. It was like being
crippled with grief. You lose a part of yourself, of your body.” His
writing was temporarily paralyzed, but by sheer determination he
resumed his technique of recovery by leading a strictly orderly
life; each hour had its tasks.
Though he declared he was going to retire, he remained active
in the theater and helped produce at least three more films. At
home, he made time for reading, listening to his beloved music, and
for his daily walk where he found comfort in nature: the sea, the
subdued colors of the island. Every Saturday morning he carried on
long telephone conversations with his actor friend of many years,
Erland Josephson. And in the privacy and solitude of his home he
also talked with Ingrid.
At times she seemed to answer, giving him good advice. Often he
could feel her presence near him. He died in 2007 at the age of 89.
That he was able to live peacefully and independently on his island
refuge—that he no longer needed a woman to at least temporarily fill
the hole of loneliness and appease the raging monsters—is proof to
me that this extraordinary man had truly healed himself.