Barbara Young is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been practicing in the Baltimore, Maryland, area for more than fifty years. Twenty-five of her papers on the relationship of therapy and creativity have been published. Young is also an accomplished photographer.
Young was born with a curious mind and an eye for beauty. Growing up during the Great Depression in the home of a liberal Congregational minister and a former Greek and Latin teacher, she resolved to become a doctor who could afford to have enough to eat. Her three siblings fulfilled similar aspirations.
Becoming a doctor was a necessity, but it was a curiosity about how her mind worked that led her into psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Her urge to write about life’s complexity and fragility burst into life after she was thrown into rocks off the Mediterranean coast while swimming, leading to her first psychological sketch, “How Much Battering Can a Body Stand?” Her photographic eye, which had been active all along, became her greatest joy when Edward Steichen accepted Golden Leaves—an image of a Japanese maple in the fall—for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen wrote that Golden Leaves gives “the feeling of what might be behind a troubled mind as expressed in the twisted turbulences one finds in nature.”
That joy still exists, and even though Young now has to brace herself against a chair to keep from falling, she has recently created Course of Life, a series capturing from her office window the seasonal scenes of a Japanese maple tree.
It is perhaps natural that when Young became acquainted with Ingmar Bergman’s films—those films made rich by his curiosity about human nature and his extraordinary eye—she felt a deep affinity with Bergman and a wish to know him better. Thus was born The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film.