This article examines the cinematic art of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries as it resonates with the clinical art of psychoanalysis, with particular reference to dreams. If we imagine that the film is the patient—not Bergman or the film's protagonist Isak Borg, but the film itself—we can examine all the perceptual “data” beyond the verbal narrative that are particular to the narrative techniques of this film and of the cinematic medium, for example, the nature of the images, the type and angles of shots, continuity and cutting between sequences, and the sound track (beyond Borg's narrative).
The director has clearly made conscious cinematic choices about the presentation of the material; he wants certain things to stand out and, as spectators, our task is in part to place ourselves in his hands, to “regress in the service of the ego.” But we must also function as critics, so we take in what the director asks us to experience while trying not to come to a premature closure about what it all means; we may well find meanings that the filmmaker did not anticipate.
While the analyst takes a narrative and deconstructs it, spectatorship involves taking the chains of images and pieces of cinematic data and constructing a coherence out of them—really a synthesis rather than an analysis. But the spectator is also analyzing. In a clinical situation, listening with evenly hovering attention allows us to become aware of a host of phenomena, things such as pauses, abrupt digressions, fidgeting or movements of the patient on the couch, tears, changes in affective tone as well as our own counter-transference experiences, such as boredom or other affects that seem inappropriate. We experience and observe. This singular duality of perspective, this movement back and forth between self and other, is also a way, though by no means the only way, to enter into the life of a film. What follows is an account of my own analytic encounter with Wild Strawberries.
The film just begins—no credits or titles—just the image in close-up of an old man writing at his desk. A voice-over narration, presumably what he is writing. I am suddenly thrust into the thick of things with him; no possibility of distancing behind the credits….he's speaking to me.
Bonnie S. Kaufman, M.D., is associate clinical professor of psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and faculty member, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She has written and lectured extensively on psychoanalysis and film.
I hear about his work, which begins with drudgery and ends with a love of science. Now I am shown a series of photographs from his desktop and side table. He describes them: his son, a doctor living in Lund, long married but without children, his very aged mother, still living, his wife Karin, long dead. Something seems odd in this “gallery” of still photos at the start of a motion picture; then, there is a cut to the entrance of his elderly housekeeper announcing lunch. Finally, he notes that his full name is Eberhard Isak Borg, that he is 78 years old, and that on the following afternoon he will receive an honorary doctorate at Lund cathedral. There the continuity stops and brief credits appear, set apart from the action. The pause seems an opportunity for some assimilation and synthesis of what has just been presented, as well as some free association. An old man has captured my attention by the immediacy of his narrative and the arresting figure he presents before me. Important people in his life are presented through still photographs, while his housekeeper, living and breathing, present, cares for him and feeds him despite his being, by his own admission, difficult to deal with. This material is privileged over his name, age, and his imminent honors, as if these latter details are an afterthought. And, I realize, there has been no mention of his father.
We frequently find that the first dream in an analysis is likely to contain all the themes that will dominate the process…
I have noted his son's childless marriage, his wife's early death. I have also become aware of the stark light and shadows of the scene, the close, intimate head shots which introduce me to every line, every craggy angle of Borg's face. I feel filled with the film; I must contain and somehow process it. I will enter into an ongoing dynamic relationship with it, a process of simultaneous analysis and synthesis.
After the interlude of credits and titles, the continuity of the scenes resumes, and I see Borg in bed, while in the voice-over he recounts, from early in the morning of the day of his award ceremony, a strange and very unpleasant dream. The dream is presented in a multilayered form with striking visual images that are bleak, stark, and dramatically lit.
We frequently find that the first dream in an analysis is likely to contain all the themes that will dominate the process; I will apply a version of this concept to the first dream of Wild Strawberries. It is testimony to the extraordinary complexity of Bergman's vision that it is so difficult to capture in a linear form what is happening in this dream. What follows is my experience of Bergman's dream-text (with my associations in parentheses).
Isak says the dream was very unpleasant; he is affectively disturbed. The text of the dream proper begins: On his early morning walk he loses his way in a district unknown to him. (A journey into uncharted territory, a journey gone wrong. The scene seems so silent.) Long shot of a sign hanging from a building in the distance, seen approximately from Borg's point of view. (I am situated behind Borg; the sign looks like a large circle, under it, two smaller circles, side by side, each with a dot in the center—a schematic of a faceless woman with breasts.) Borg walks toward the sign, passes it and looks up at it from the other side. (Again, I have a similar point of view to his, a little behind him; the smaller circles are eyes, damaged and weepy, with tears, perhaps, or infection.) The sign appears to be that of an oculist (problems of sight or insight?) Above the eyes, the large circle is the face of a clock but without hands. Borg checks his own pocket watch, there are no hands on it either. The silence of the scene gives way to the sound of a loud heartbeat. (Anxiety about the missing hands of the clock and watch and the expected ticking of a watch giving way to the sound of a heartbeat makes me think of a regression from the chronological time of the secondary process real world to the timelessness of the unconscious, the oceanic feelings of the infant at the breast, or still in the womb, hearing the heartbeat of the mother, the recall of very early preverbal experience.) On one side is the faceless mother breast, on the other the symbol of the father, damaged, vision and sense of time impaired, missing pieces (castrated?). Borg's own watch, similarly mutilated, creates intense anxiety.
Next a long shot of Borg walking the streets. We are now positioned far from him and his point of view. (It feels very isolating, so ironically, I can perhaps best identify with his isolation from here.) Borg suddenly sees a figure in a coat and hat from the rear: He approaches. We see first Borg's face as he looks at the face of the man and registers horror. We then see that the figure has an awful, shriveled, un-human visage. The figure crumples to the ground in a fetal position and seems to bleed from a severed head. Chiming of church bells (a reminder of death and also the cathedral at Lund where the ceremony will take place). Borg stands in apprehension as a horse-drawn carriage or cart appears around a corner. It is a hearse carrying a coffin. Cut to a long shot of the empty circle with breasts, then back to Borg, walking toward the carriage. It passes him, and one wheel catches on a lamppost to jarring repeated sounds of clanging metal. A wheel comes off the carriage, the lamppost is also damaged. (Clash of people who damage each other, or a child's perception of intercourse, perhaps.) The wheel nearly knocks Borg down, the carriage sways precariously, (the creaking sound of its hinges as it sways begins to sound like a baby wailing) as we are shown a close-up shot of a carved child's head adorning the top of the carriage. The swaying causes the coffin to slide to the ground (a coffin or an amniotic sac, a death or a birth?) breaks open, and a hand is flung out of the opening into Borg's and our view. As Borg approaches, the hand moves, gripping his own, and holding it fast. A torso and face emerge from the coffin—it is Borg's own!
Associations follow thick and fast. (The eerie silence, the desolation and isolation of the scene. The uncanny face of the male figure, more like some awful scarecrow than a man. The creaking swaying hearse and its metamorphosis into a cradle rocking a crying baby. The image of the “birth” of the coffin sliding out of the carriage. The arm gripping Borg's as though from beyond the grave and simultaneously from beyond the womb.)
Borg awakes in anxiety and prepares for his flight from (and also journey toward) all that he fears and has feared for his entire lifetime. I, like his daughter-in-law Marianne, decide to come along for the ride, as this story of a literal journey—through the lakes and farmlands of the provinces between Stockholm and Lund—is transformed into a metaphorical journey through the landscapes of Borg's past and of his heart.
Marianne, married to Isak's cold and distant son, secretly carries life inside her. She is now going home to tell her husband the news which she fears will not be welcome. When, in despair, she tells Isak that she has no interest in his dreams, we see his car make its literal detour off the main highway onto the back road that will take him back in memory and metaphor to the summer house of his childhood and the patch of wild strawberries. By the end of his journey, encountering his past in his present and his present in his past, he can write his story for us with the deep conviction that in this hopelessly entangled chain of events, there was a remarkable causality. From enduring a living death, Isak, through his reencounter with his past, embarks on the final years of his life with the promise of being able, finally, to be alive. Marianne can finally embrace him as “Father Isak.”
What I have tried to describe here is the personal journey into the film that is part of every cinematic experience, but which a psychoanalytic perspective is uniquely able to articulate. I am ready to continue my Travels with Isak as both participant and observer. This kind of journey may appeal to you, or your own encounter with this and other films may take you to other destinations by different routes. Our patient is, after all, only a movie, albeit a great one; no harm can come to it at our hands, and under these conditions analysis, like strawberries, may be that much tastier when it is just a little wild.