This is what he had feared most of all, the end with no mercy, punishment with no forgiveness, hurled into the darkness, he will land in a hole among sharp stones, and no one will look after him, no one will lift him out of the darkness.—Bergman, Sunday’s Children
Bergman’s mother, Karin Akerblom Bergman, was born to a well-to-do family who wintered in Uppsala just north of Stockholm. They also had a summer home that her father Carl Johan had built in the northern woods of Dalarna overlooking the Southern Dalarna Railroad. “Trains were something of a passion with him, so he built himself a house halfway along the line, and the trains went straight through his garden. . . . There the old boy used to sit. . . . I remember sitting on his knee. He had a big beard and a starched collar and was paralyzed in both legs.”[1] Her mother, Anna, was an intelligent woman who had taught French. She was very firm in her convictions that her daughter Karin, a graduate nurse, should not marry the impoverished theological student, Erik Bergman. They were second cousins. Anna’s husband had been incapacitated in his later years with a rare, progressive muscular degeneration. She feared for the children to come. In addition, Erik was not of the right class.
His family had been farmers and parsons for generations. Erik’s father, who had been a pharmacist, had died when Erik was young, and soon thereafter Erik lost a younger sister. His way of coping with these early losses was to pretend he was a minister at funerals. He and his mother were very poor because the grandparents who had money would not assist them because they had disapproved of the marriage. Erik was so full of rage at them that he refused the beseeching of his grandfather to visit his grandmother on her deathbed. An aunt stepped in and supplied the money for his education.
The first time Erik visited the Akerblom home, Bergman’s grandmother developed a severe animosity toward Erik that was never to abate, continuing to aggravate the tensions that existed between Bergman’s parents as long as she lived.
What we know of the marriage of Bergman’s parents is told us in The Best Intentions, a novel Bergman wrote in his early seventies when he was beginning to devote his creative energies to recording the story of his early life in a more direct, though somewhat fictionalized, way. A few details drawn from this novel predict how complicated and stormy the marriage would be; how little these two people would ever understand each other; how little they would be able to meet each other’s needs. Bergman’s view of his father’s great dependency problems is revealed in a letter he imagines his father would have written his mother before their marriage. Erik’s outbursts of retaliatory rage are predicted in the words “Watch out for me!” We can see that Bergman’s father also suffered from separation anxiety.
As soon as we are separated from each other, I am seized with a grinding anxiety that I will never see you again. . . . I would prefer to turn myself into your unborn child. I was carried in an anguished womb . . . was frozen already before my birth. . . . I am envious of our children who will sleep inside of you. . . . Sometimes I want to say: Watch out for me! At the same time I cry out: Don’t leave me, no, don’t ever leave me: only through you can I grow and mature.[2]
Erik was offered the position of chaplain in a small chapel next to a large church in the woods of Forsboda near where he had lived as a child. He wanted to be married in a broken-down greenhouse, but Karin insisted they would marry in the Uppsala Cathedral. After a vicious argument, she got her way. The wedding was March 15, 1913. Their son Dag was born in October in the Academic Hospital in Uppsala near Karin’s mother’s home, despite Erik’s furious objection. When Karin’s brother came to visit, she confided in him,
I don’t understand how someone like [Erik] who’s so kind, can go around carrying so much hatred in him. . . . Sometimes I can’t make head or tail of anything. Sometimes a chasm opens up. I keep away so as not to fall into it. . . . And say nothing. A few hours later everything’s normal again and [Erik] is the kindest, happiest, sweetest. . . . Well, you’ll see.[3]
How much depression did such mercurial, unhappy parents inevitably pass on to their children, biologically as well as experientially? Bergman spoke about his biological inheritance to Richard Meryman in an article in Life magazine (1971) titled “I Live at the Edge of a Very Strange Country”: “The only thing I can tell you about my tensions is that much of the internal dialogue inside me is between the 50 percent of my mother and the 50 percent of my father I carry inside. Both were extreme and very strong personalities. They were married 52 years, but they never understood a word one of them said to the other. They were as water and fire.”[4]
Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern was published in 1987. Since we are dealing with an artist who had been a storyteller all his life, it should come as no surprise that imagination has embellished the truth. Memory is an elastic thing. Children, in particular, will take the facts they know and fill in the blanks to make a coherent story. For example, Bergman’s sister Margareta, four years younger, says her brother exaggerated the degree of his punishment by their father. Perhaps Ingmar did exaggerate the number of times he was beaten. However, if even just once a child has been beaten and humiliated into begging for forgiveness in the name of God and forced to spend the rest of the day in unbearable silence, that trauma will leave permanent scars. Witnessing the cruel, repeated beatings of his older brother Dag had been equally traumatic for Bergman. So when Bergman tells us his story at the age of sixty-nine, he is not exaggerating or lying—as he was so often accused of as a child. He is telling us how the traumatic events of his childhood affected him and gave rise to the demons of terror, humiliation, and uncontrolled rage that tormented him most of his life.
Bergman ends The Magic Lantern with a detailed account of his birth that he says he discovered in his mother’s diary after she died. Recently a historian has read the diaries of Bergman’s mother from cover to cover and found no such description, only the statement “Ernst Ingmar Bergman born on July 14, 1918.” So where did Bergman get the account of his almost dying shortly after his birth with which he ends the biography? The little raconteur, still very much alive at sixty-nine, no doubt created a story out of pieces of overheard conversation as well as his fantasies about what he might have done to make his mother so rejecting of him. And—in a positive vein—he might have wished to explain to himself how it came about that he had such a powerful, loving relationship with his maternal grandmother.
However, before we begin Bergman’s dramatic account of his birth, we must mention an unexpected event that occurred in the Bergman world in 2011, four years after his death. Veronica Ralston, daughter of Bergman’s sister, met an artist colleague, Louise Tillberg, who claimed that Ingmar Bergman had died at birth and that her uncle had been surreptitiously introduced into the Erik and Karin Bergman family. Tests were done comparing Bergman’s DNA from licked postage stamps to those of his niece, establishing the fact that Karin Bergman could not be the biological mother of Ingmar.
Supporting this extraordinary revelation is the fact that records still exist which indicate that regular payments were sent to Hedvig Sjöberg Tillberg from the Hedvig Eleonora parish in Stockholm where Bergman’s father had been pastor. However, within several months, the rumor was dispelled. The quality of the saliva on the stamps made it impossible to obtain an accurate reading of Bergman’s DNA. Furthermore, it was discovered that Sjöberg’s baby had been given up for adoption. Why the church was sending money is not known, though it is possible that Erik Bergman had been having a long-term affair with Hedvig and had fathered her three sons who are said to look very much like Bergman. Margareta asserts that their father’s sexual needs were seldom satisfied at home.[5]
Even if the rumor had been true, Karin Akerblom Bergman is the mother who raised Bergman. It was she whom he was “madly in love” with. It was her unhappiness that had caused her feelings for her children to turn cold after her momentary flashes of warmth. And it was she who stood silently by while observing her angry, frustrated husband beat and humiliate their sons.
* * *
My intent is not to try to separate out the truth from Bergman’s somewhat fictionalized autobiography for, as I indicated above, his embellished story is in some ways more accurate than the literal truth: his story is how he perceived what happened to him, what feelings had been aroused in him, and it was his way of creating meaning out of his childhood experiences. It is that truth that led to the agonies he struggled with most of his life. It is that truth that he used as the basis for the creation of his films.
Bergman begins his autobiography The Magic Lantern with his version of his precarious beginnings, and he brings the book to an end with a quotation from his mother’s diary that he and his father read about the time of her death. Bergman:
When I was born in 1918, my mother had Spanish influenza. . . . The old house doctor looked at me and said, “He’s dying of undernourishment.” My maternal grandmother took me with her to her summer-house in Dalarna, and on the [long] train journey . . . she fed me with sponge cake soaked with water. . . . I was practically dead but Grandmother managed to find a wet nurse. . . . I got better but was always vomiting and had constant stomachaches. I suffered from several indefinable illnesses and could never really decide whether I wanted to live at all.[6]
His mother’s diary:
Have been too ill to write in recent weeks. Erik has had Spanish flu for the second time. Our son was born on Sunday morning on 14 July. He immediately contracted a high temperature and severe diarrhoea. He looked like a tiny skeleton with a big fiery red nose. He stubbornly refused to open his eyes. I had no milk after a few days because of my illness. Then he was baptized in an emergency here at the hospital. He is called Ernst Ingmar. Ma has taken him to Väroms where she found a wet nurse. Ma is bitter about Erik’s inability to solve our practical problems. Erik resents interference in our private life. I lie here helpless and miserable. Sometimes when I am alone, I cry. If the boy dies, Ma says she will look after Dag, and I am to take up my profession again. She wants Erik and me to separate as soon as possible “before in his mad hatred he thinks up some other insanity.” I don’t think I have the right to leave Erik. He is overwrought and his nerves have been bad all spring. Ma says he feigns it, but I don’t believe that. I pray to God with no confidence. One will have to manage.[7]
We don’t know when the child was returned to his mother’s care in Stockholm, but since he was being fed by a wet nurse, at least a year must have passed before his mother assumed responsibility for him. We can imagine what a confusing, devastating experience it was for the young child to move from the maternal bonding of three loving faces beaming down on him to the face of his mother who not only had been deprived of her natural, maternal attachment to the infant by her serious illness, but who was ambivalent toward him because she had planned to leave her husband if the baby died. Because he lived, she felt she was trapped in her difficult marriage.
And it was not just her emotional withdrawal that led the boy to fear being abandoned. At times he could hear his parents quarreling: his mother’s harsh, attacking voice, his father’s painfully pleading and apologizing voice. Bergman’s sister has recorded that one or another of their parents was often absent, spending time in a nursing home. And when Bergman was seven, his mother was having an affair with a young ministerial student whom she dearly loved.
From what we know of his mother’s character, Bergman was probably fortunate to have had three loving mothers in his early months. However, when he returned to his birth-mother’s care, he suffered with constant separation anxiety and feelings of abandonment—the sense that his very life was precarious—due to the loss of his mother-trio. He fought back, but left part of his developing conscience behind, making him coconspirator with his brother’s violent behavior.
The adult Bergman, in his films, tackled the demons that continued to haunt him. In the films The Silence (1963) and Persona (1965–1966) he deals with the pain of abandonment. And later, after his mother’s death in 1966, in Hour of the Wolf (1966–1968) and The Passion of Anna (1968–1969), Bergman dares to share with us his terror of disintegration and the murderous impulses he fought so valiantly to keep under control.
* * *
Our relationships with our mothers and fathers and the other significant people in our lives continue for as long as we live, long after they are no longer present. From the moment of birth we begin to take into ourselves “pieces” of them. It is out of these interchanges and the incorporation of them that infants come into existence as human beings. And we continue to profit from these internalized objects—or to suffer from them—all our lives. However, it is not Mother, Father, or Grandmother we take in but countless mothers, fathers, and grandmothers. Each significant interchange is internalized in two parts; for example, both what we perceive our mother is feeling toward us by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face as well as the pain or pleasure we feel in response. Because young Bergman’s mind internalized such an enormous collection of hurtful and rejecting “mothers,” along with an equal quantity of frightened and murderously angry “selves,” his intimacies as an adult were fraught with desperate neediness, anxiety, and concealed rage.
* * *
In Bergman’s fifth marriage, he was finally able to make a secure relationship from which he did not have to escape. Then after their twenty-four years of marriage, Ingrid von Rosen died of cancer. Because of the psychological growth he had accomplished through writing his films, Bergman had the caring, loving, self-controlled Ingrid solidly inside him, keeping him company and offering him advice. Though she was literally gone, she was very much alive. Though Bergman grieved, he did not return to the terrible state of loneliness that had plagued him most of his life. He enjoyed his much deserved rest and solitude with music, island walks, his movie afternoons, and weekly phone conversations with his dear friend Erland Josephson. Relaxing on his sofa, he tossed around the ideas that were always sprouting in his mind. He no longer needed snowballs and colored threads to add to his store of scripts in order to remain sane. They were just fun to play with and to remind him of all he had accomplished in his driven productivity in order to maintain a precariously integrated self.
* * *
Knowing now how it is that early traumas have such a long internal life, let us return to the literal, external world in which young Bergman floundered. Dag, his older brother by four years, resented the baby boy who he felt had replaced him in his mother’s affection. Dag took delight in teasing his brother unmercifully and in acts such as bribing him to eat an earthworm, which he did. There were fights, attempts at drowning. As Ingmar grew stronger, he retaliated by trying to kill Dag. He stood on a chair behind a door and hit Dag over the head with a carafe filled with water. The injury was bloody. Dag struck back, knocking out Ingmar’s two front teeth. Ingmar set fire to his brother’s bed. When Bergman began to attend school, his aggression was out of control. Once he took revenge on a former classmate by taking his brother’s sheath-knife and chasing him around the playground. When a teacher threw herself between them, he tried to kill her. He was removed from school and severely beaten.
When Bergman was four, a sister was born and he was put out of his mother’s bed. His temper tantrums knew no bounds. Dag showed him how to kill the baby by strangling her in the bassinet. Instead, Ingmar pressed on the baby’s chest, the baby screamed, and Ingmar lost his footing and fell to the floor. His pleasure at this deed quickly turned to terror.
Why was there this defect in the children’s conscience? Why was there no voice inside them that said No! You can dream of killing but you musn’t actually do it? Virginia Woolf, when she was four, was pummeling her younger brother. Suddenly it occurred to her, “I’m hurting someone I love!” She pulled her hands back.
Why was it that Bergman did not have that No! voice inside him? Though Bergman declared all his life, “I was madly in love with my mother,” it is possible that his clinging as a child was not so much true love—which would have enabled him to pull his hands back out of love for his mother—but his desperate hunger for satisfaction of the fundamental need, which he had lost too soon, to be lovingly caressed and acknowledged as valuable. After Bergman walked out of his parents’ house in his early twenties because his father was continuing to attempt to control his life, many years passed before he could bear to reconcile with them, despite their many attempts to see him.
We will look back on these speculations when we later explore, along with Bergman, his puzzlement and embarrassment that he could love someone so much and yet not live with her. When he fell in love, did he regress to those infantile feelings of desperate longing and jealousy as well as retaliation? When his love turned from warm to cold, did he withdraw from relationships out of his desperate attempt to contain his mounting aggression as much as possible? Even though passionate love had disappeared, Bergman remained friends with his four wives and three intimate women companions and continued for years to make use of their skills in his films.
* * *
It is no wonder that Bergman’s parents were so concerned by their children’s behavior that they consulted a pediatrician, but Erik’s punishments were so cruel and humiliating because of the suppressed rage he carried from his poverty-stricken background, and his whippings only fueled the Bergman boys’ aggression rather than assisting them in regulating and containing their impulsive actions. An enormous tension existed between the parents. They went about their church work in stoic silence. Even the punishments of the children were administered without emotion. In The Magic Lantern Bergman describes the beatings Dag and he received in the attempts of their pastor-father to cure them.
Even for minor infractions, the carpet beater was brought out and you yourself had to state how many strokes you considered you deserved. . . . I can’t maintain that it hurt all that much. The ritual and the humiliation were what were so painful. Mother used to sit by Dag’s bed, bathing his back where the carpet beater had loosed the skin and streaked his back with bloody wheals. As I hated my brother and was frightened of his sudden flaring rages, I found great satisfaction in seeing him punished so severely. After the strokes had been administered, you had to kiss Father’s hand, at which forgiveness was declared and the burden of sin fell away, deliverance and grace ensued.[8]
There was no supper for the culprit and no one spoke to him. Bergman could never understand why his mother stood by silently and did not interrupt the beatings. At other times Ingmar was locked in a dark cupboard where he was told there was a little creature that ate the toes of naughty children. He was terrified, but he soon found a way to outwit the demon-person who had ordered the imprisonment. He hid a flashlight in the cupboard so he could see in the dark and hide from the dangerous creature. Bergman watched his parents closely and lied to avoid punishment. This made him feel like “a shit and a scoundrel,” but it was his way of protecting himself. He tried in many ways to be recognized by his parents for who he truly was.
When left to their own devices, the brothers enjoyed playing together with their many toys. And there were good times with their father as well. Bergman delighted in traveling with his father on his bicycle to visit various parishes, learning the names of the flowers, the trees and birds, and swimming with his father. But in Bergman’s autobiographical novel Sunday’s Children, when the boy accompanies his father on a trip out of his sensitivity to his father’s loneliness, his father unexpectedly attacks him, and the boy thinks, “I’ll kill him when I get home, and I’ll think out a painful death, he’ll beg for mercy.”[9] The boy’s Oedipal wishes for his father’s death are disguised by his justified outrage at his father’s cruelty.
In Sunday’s Children the little boy overhears his parents arguing. His mother is talking of leaving. “This is what he had feared most of all, the end with no mercy, punishment with no forgiveness, hurled into the darkness, he will land in a hole among sharp stones, and no one will look after him, no one will lift him out of the darkness.”[10] “His intestines are roiling around and in turmoil, a hard lump of shit pressing against his asshole, wanting out.” He uses a pail to relieve himself. He is pale and sweaty. Here we have the threat to Bergman’s very existence, one which devastated his normal gastrointestinal functioning: his fear that his parents would leave each other, taking with them the very foundation upon which his life was built.
Once Bergman began to “own” himself in his adolescence and became a miniature director of his own puppet theater, he worked all the time, just as he worked all his life with extraordinary determination, discipline, and regularity. When he was twelve, he and his sister and two friends made two film scripts, calling themselves The Four’s Film Bureau.
However, the damage done by his parents’ severe attempts to bring their unruly sons under control was great. In Dag’s last years, when he was severely crippled with an inherited muscular degeneration, he came with his wife to visit Bergman. “He spoke of his hatred of Father and his strong ties to Mother. To him, they were still parents, mysterious creatures, capricious, incomprehensible and larger than life. . . . Our mutual antipathy had gone, but had left space for emptiness; there was no contact, no affinity. My brother wanted to die.”[11]
Ingmar had been more fortunate in life; he had been able to make use of his creative genius to survive in this emotionally tumultuous deprivation, and as an adult, he had grown his films out of the soil of his suffering. From a distance of over fifty years he could say, “Nowadays, I understand my parents’ desperation. A pastor’s family lives as if on a tray, unprotected from other eyes. The parsonage must always be open to criticism and comments from the congregation. . . . Their working day was open-ended, their marriage difficult, their self-discipline iron-hard.”[12]
When Bergman was eighty-five, a conversation with Marie Nyreröd was filmed. Bergman takes off a wedding ring that was his father’s. “Karin” is engraved inside. As he turns and examines the ring thoughtfully with his gnarled hands, we are shown a series of photographs. In the first, his mother holds him as a baby, and there is little expression on his face. In the second, Ingmar is in his grandmother’s arms at three or four months; she is smiling as she looks down at him, while he is serious but not depressed. In another, he and his brother are with their father. Their father holds the bicycle, with shy little Ingmar cuddled up to him, sitting on the seat. Dag on the handlebars is serious. Then we see Ingmar’s parents seated at a table. His father is engrossed in reading; his mother is looking at the camera, depression in her eyes. The gap between them is palpable, while Ingmar at three or four looks very serious and unhappy. In another picture, taken several years later, Ingmar’s sister Margareta is in the middle with her arms around her brothers’ necks, and none of them look happy: Dag is resolute, Ingmar is on guard, and their sister is smiling an ambiguous, guarded smile. And in the last photo, Ingmar and Dag are together at perhaps five and nine. Ingmar looks pale and washed out, as if he has been beaten down.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These could be isolated bad moments captured by the camera. But they tend to confirm Bergman’s stories about his early life. It is noteworthy that his one smile occurs when he is in his father’s arms.
Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, Jonas Sima (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 184.
Ingmar Bergman, The Best Intentions: A Novel (New York: Arcade, 1991), 163.
Bergman, The Best Intentions, 197.
Ingmar Bergman, “I Live at the Edge of a Very Strange Country,” Life, October 15, 1971.
Geoffrey Macnab, “House Rules,” Sight & Sound (June 2001).
Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, trans. Joan Tate (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 1.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 289.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 8.
Ingmar Bergman, Sunday’s Children: A Novel (New York: Arcade, 1993), 123.
Bergman, Sunday’s Children, 79.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 57.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 9.