First of all I must acknowledge Ingmar Bergman himself. Born under the worst of circumstances, he spent at least the first year of his life in his grandmother’s home. She continued to play an active part in his life as long as she lived. It was her love for him and her acceptance of him as a real person that nurtured his latent artistic genius. Bergman’s relationship with his grandmother was more complex than he at first recognized. His negative feelings toward her were hidden and were the source of depressive feelings when he should have been rejoicing after the success of The Magic Flute. Using his analytic skills, by writing Face to Face he recovered, coming face to face with the truth. No longer did he need to punish himself for his anger at her subtle cruelty.
When Bergman was a child, performing plays with his puppet theater and projecting little films with his magic lantern became a means of survival as he floated above the discord in his family. His writing at nineteen was destined to find its way to the movie screen. His first films were practice runs, created to understand his demons. Without his realizing it, these efforts were the start of his self-analysis. Although he did not write openly about his childhood suffering until he was sixty when he made Fannie and Alexander, we have information from his many interviews and conversations that leads us to see who these demons were and how his films were a gradual process of coming to terms with them and eventually conquering them. His genius at performing his own analysis has never been equaled.
My bibliography lists the many sources I used to conduct my analysis of Bergman’s self-analysis. Each writer approached Bergman from his own point of view, but I want to acknowledge those who contributed the most to my understanding. Bergman’s friend Jörn Donner, a Finnish actor, director, and producer, published The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman in 1962. The actress Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s partner for six years, published Changing in 1976. In this work Ullmann shares with us how very difficult it was to live with Bergman’s uncontrolled aggression and perpetual, anxious tension. Peter Cowie, a British film historian, published Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography in 1982. He commented on many of the DVDs of Bergman films and was a contributing editor to the ten-pound book Ingmar Bergman Archives published in 2008, the year after Bergman died. This volume contains a multitude of quotations by Bergman and comments by his collaborators about what it was like to work with him, as well as a lifetime of photographs.
Frank Gado was a professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York, at the time he wrote The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, published in 1986. It is considered the most compelling psychological study of Bergman ever attempted, though Gado does not take into account that it was Bergman’s trauma as an infant and very young child that were responsible for the degree of his psychological and physical suffering. Jerry Vermilye’s book Ingmar Bergman: His Life and Films appeared in 2002. A writer and actor, Vermilye has produced a text that is short and beautifully organized, with details of each film and brief comments on them. I found myself returning to his book over and over again to orient myself. British film critic Geoffrey Macnab’s fine book Ingmar Bergman: The Life and Films of the Last Great European Director appeared in 2009, two years after Bergman’s death.
I have left to last the essay “The Demon-Lover,” written for the New Yorker by John Lahr and published in 1999. Bergman and Lahr had at least two long, comfortable visits together in Stockholm in l996 and 1999, and it seems to me that Lahr more than any of Bergman’s other biographers understood fully the source of Bergman’s demons as well as the self-analysis Bergman was undertaking. Perhaps this sentence by Lahr sums up Bergman’s task: “From an early age, Bergman re-created in himself a kind of alternative mother—giving himself, in his fantasy-obsessed play—his own form of undivided attention.” The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film is the story of Bergman’s success. He finally gave himself a loving, internalized mother who made it possible for him to control his aggression and be comfortable in an intimate relationship.
I would like to thank my dear friends René J. Muller and David Turetsky for standing by me every step of this long journey. They read each chapter as it came into being—René with his broad psychological experience and philosophical knowledge and years of publication in the field of psychiatry, and David with his love of film and his psychological perceptiveness, in addition to his computer savvy, of which I was often in need. Jackie Wehmueller has contributed enormously both her skills as an editor and her sensitivity to human feelings and behavior. My knowledge of the life-long, deleterious effect of early childhood trauma comes from what I learned in my therapeutic work with patients who had experienced devastating trauma similar to Bergman’s, and from what I learned from my friend Silvia Bell, a child analyst.
For years I was encouraged in my writing by the late Leon Levin, founder of the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Film Forum. Participating in film presentations set alight my passion for film as an art medium. And thanks to Bruce Sklarew for leading me back to Bergman by suggesting I discuss Wild Strawberries. Encouragement of my writing also has come from Nancy McCall at the Johns Hopkins Medical Archives and Stuart Twemlow, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. And last but by far not least, I want to acknowledge Minnie Arter and James Matthews, whose presence as my receptionists and “right arm” have made it possible for me to see my patients, to continue to work as a photographer, and to write.
Finally, leading me patiently through the morass of preparation for publication of this book has been acquisitions editor Stephen Ryan and production editor Kellie Hagan of Rowman & Littlefield. Sharon Johnson, who prepared the index, enjoyed the book as she went along.