The Drama of the Gifted Child (The Search for the True Self)

about his own childhood, which he described as one long
story of humiliation. He related, for example, that if he wet
his trousers he had to wear a red dress all day so that everybody
would know what he had done and he would have to
be ashamed of himself. Ingmar Bergman was the younger
son of a Protestant pastor. In this television interview he
described a scene that often occurred during his childhood.
His older brother has just been beaten by the father. Now
their mother is dabbing his brother's bleeding back with
cotton wool. He himself sits watching. Bergman described
this scene without apparent agitation, almost coldly. One
can see him as a child, quietly sitting and watching. He
surely did not run away, nor close his eyes, nor cry. One
has the impression that this scene did take place in reality,
but at the same time is a covering memory for what he
himself went through. It is unlikely that only his brother
was beaten by their father.
It sometimes happens that patients in analysis are convinced
that only their siblings suffered humiliation. Only
after years of analysis can they remember, with feelings
of rage and helplessness, of anger and indignation, how
humiliated and deserted they felt when they were beaten
by their beloved father.
Ingmar Bergman, however, had other possibilities, apart
from projection and denial, for dealing with his sufferinghe
could make films. It is conceivable that we, as the
movie audience, have to endure those feelings that he, the
son of such a father, could not experience overtly but
nevertheless carried within himself. We sit before the
screen confronted, the way that small boy once was, with all
the cruelty "our brother" has to endure, and hardly feel
able or willing to take in all this brutality with authentic
feelings; we ward them off. When Bergman speaks regret-
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