All about his mother: A Jungian analysis of Persona
Since its release in 1966, critics and viewers alike have puzzled over Ingmar Bergman’s psychological masterpiece Persona. It’s naive to think it possible to pin a great work of art like Persona down to one interpretation. Yet it is possible to go shockingly far in explicating the film’s many mysteries by applying the tools of Jungian analysis. Once the symbols in the seemingly unreadable opening montage have been parsed and dream interpretation techniques have been applied to the main film, what emerges is a startlingly personal story of a little boy, now grown, trying to unpack the enigma of his rejecting mother.
The Camera as Psychopomp
Persona begins with a short experimental prologue that seemingly have little to do with the film that follows. That is, until we reject the assumption that it is just a series of unrelated, highly-charged images and treat it as a sequence of symbols structured to convey meaning just as the words in this sentence are structured to convey meaning:
The sequence opens with the clatter of a projector running. Amidst extreme close-ups of the projector apparatus, at the 32" mark, there is an image of an erect penis, appearing for just three frames, almost subliminal. Rather than dismissing this shot as inscrutable or random, I believe Bergman is creating a herm.
A herm is a square pillar topped by a bust of the god Hermes with genitals carved into the pillar at the appropriate height. In “Man and his Symbols”, edited by Carl Jung to popularize his ideas, the herm is described as placed at cross-roads, symbolizing Herme’s role as a psychopomp, a mediator between the world of the living and the underworld. “Hermes is Trickster in a different role as a messenger, a god of the cross-roads, and finally the leader of souls to and from the underworld. His phallus therefore penetrates from the known into the unknown world, seeking a spiritual message of deliverance and healing.”
Man and His Symbols was published in 1964, two years before the release of Persona. Bergman is obviously au fait with Jungian ideas and Persona is rife with Jungian themes in addition to being named after the Jungian concept of persona. It’s not far-fetched to assume that he would have been highly interested in Man and His Symbols, the last work undertaken by Carl Jung and his first work undertaken with the purpose of introducing the wider public to his ideas.
If Bergman is indeed creating a herm by attaching a phallus to film equipment, we can expect the film to follow to be a journey to some sort of underworld, to penetrate the unknown and otherwise unknowable through the medium of film.
A crucifying trauma
Continuing with the montage, we then see an old-timey cartoon projection, upside down and indistinct. It is a matron-y woman in an old-fashioned bathing suit splashing herself with water. It’s quaint and nostalgic. This shot is followed by a pair of child’s hands, free and mobile. A white light overwhelms the screen. What follows are increasingly horrifying aversive vignettes: bogeymen scaring a sleeper, a huge spider, a lamb being bled out and eviscerated and finally a spike being driven through a man’s hands. After that, a brick wall. Inside the building are dead bodies lying on mortuary slabs: and old woman, a young boy, an old man. The old man opens his eyes when the alarm sounds. But in the next shot it is the young boy who gets up. He notices something while reading a book and reaches straight towards the camera. Reverse shot to see he is groping towards a blown-up face of a woman that is indistinct and morphing. Title cards appears. Throughout the title sequence, we are intercutting intense closeups of the young boy’s face with intense closeups of the lead actresses. The titles end with a very brief shot of old-fashioned cops and robbers.
What does this all mean? I think Persona is a psychic investigation by Bergman of his mother through film. His memory of her (the cartoon matron) are seemingly pleasant and anodyne. But it is also upside down (something’s wrong). The child’s hands shows his childhood innocence and freedom once upon a time. The bogeymen represents childhood trauma, which became a spider that fills up the screen(people are often phobic of spiders in an outsized way). The killing of the lamb is the death of innocence. Finally, we see the adult’s hand being nailed down in mocking contrast to the child’s hands’ freedom. Something about the seemingly harmless mother wounded her child so deeply he experienced the trauma as crucifying. What is it? Next cut is a brick wall, then buildings filled with dead bodies. A literal dead-end to the situation, until an alarm sounds and what we thought of as the old man’s corpse opens his eyes, yet in the next shot it is the young boy who gets up. The young boy, Bergman’s stand-in, reaches out to try and touch the camera, which is revealed to be standing in the place of the out-sized image of his mother’s face.
In the title sequence that follows, Bergman uses the unique qualities of film to force a confrontation between the boy and his mother figures. We have previously been put in the position of the mother (child gropes towards the camera). So when we see the child again looking at the camera piercingly, we are thrust into the role of his mother. But when we next see the face of a woman (the mother?) in a very similar confrontational stance, are we now in the role of the child? With the audience as a proxy, this might be the closest mother and son get to truly see eye-to-eye in a way they were unable to in real life.
The cops and robbers clip right before the film proper begins seems to say: “Start the investigation.” The trip to the underworld we are about to go on isn’t to the literal land of dead. But it is a trip to a place the young man longs to go to but does not normally have access to: his mother’s psyche. The indistinct mother that the child yearningly groped towards, he will see clear with the aide of the camera.
On the interpretation of dreams
The prologue montage sets the scene for the film proper: we are entering the psyche of the mother. To look for answers for why and how she wounded her son.
In Jungian dream analysis, the dreams are assumed to be subjective, not objective. This means instead of people, places and things in the dream corresponding to something concrete in the outside world, everything in the dream is made up of elements of the dreamer’s psyche. The content of the dream is not to be interpreted literally, but symbolically. Before we delve deeper, let’s look at Jung’s model of the psyche, expressed in the form of a mandala:
The ego in Jungian terms is simply the sum total of the part of ourselves that we are conscious of. At the outer edge of the ego is a kind of mask that allows us to interface with the outside world — our persona.
The shadow in Jungian terms is all the parts of ourselves that we are unconscious of. In the depth of the shadow, we find the opposite of the persona, the animus/anima, the soul of the self, often presented as a contrasexual psychic element: a female anima in the case of a man and a male animus in the case of a woman.
Ego, shadow, self
I believe Alma the nurse, played in Persona by Bibi Andersson, represents the ego of the mother. When we first see her, she is in her nurses’ uniform: a representation of her professional persona. (Karin Bergman, Bergman’s mother, was also a nurse prior to marriage.) She is being briefed by the doctor, played by Margaretha Krook. She is an external, moralistic authority, invested with wisdom and an ability to judge. In Freudian terms, we might be tempted to call her the superego. But here we will just say she represents the outside world, external forces. Alma is being tasked by the doctor to take care of Elisabet, played by Liv Ullmann, an actress who has suddenly gone mute.
Elisabet is an embodiment of the mother’s shadow, all the parts of her psyche that has gone unexpressed. Alma is practical, Elisabet is artistic. Alma always strives to be sensible, Elisbet is irrational. Alma strives to put up an upbeat front. Elisabet is unafraid to let her authentic emotions show.
Alma’s initial attempt to establish rapport with Elisabet was a disaster. To introduce herself, she barraged Elisabet with facts that she feels like defines her. “I am 25 years old and engaged. I graduated from nursing school two year ago. My parents have a farm in the country. My mother was also a nurse until she got married.” Unnerved by the silent Elisabet, Alma initially tries to reject her assignment.
According to Jung, the goal of the psyche is to be whole. We are all on a quest to achieve what Jung called ‘individuation’, where the conscious and unconscious sides of the same self are in harmony. Alma and Elizabet, two sides of the mother, starts off not just very different, but alienated from each other.
A return to nature — integration
The doctor suggests that Elisabet and Alma move away from the hospital to her cottage by the sea. Recall that in the prologue the old-fashioned matron in the projector is also standing in a body of water. Water as a symbol in dream interpretation can represent emotion, or motherhood as it is the source of all life.
Elisabet and Alma’s relationship thrived as the pair seem invigorated by the return to nature. Alma stopped wearing her nurses’ uniform, and started shedding her persona in other ways. She started confiding more and more deeply in Elisabet, sharing revelations that conflicts deeply with the image of herself she tried to project. It becomes obvious that while Elizabet is the supposed patient, it is Alma who is being healed by their burgeoning intimacy.
Alma starts to fancy that Elisabet and her look so much alike they could change into each other. “But your soul would be too big. It would stick out everywhere.” She literally starts hearing Elisabet’s thoughts and confuse it for her own. In an unforgettable dream sequence, Elisabet comes into Alma’s room and brushes Alma’s hair away from her face as they look into the mirror. It is almost as if Elisabet is showing Alma who she is. The pair then embrace in a way that is quite erotic, a beautiful illustration of two split-off psychic elements merging with each other to find blissful wholeness.
Shame and disintegration
Harmony between the two women came to a screeching end when Alma read a letter written by Elisabet that was intended for the doctor. In it Elisabet divulged Alma’s confidences, which Alma took as a terrible betrayal. Although it has brought her incredible happiness to shed her persona mask in front of Elisabet, the idea of being “naked” in the same way to the outside world as represented by the doctor is obviously completely intolerable.
The letter to the doctor that Elisabet asked Alma to post is unsealed. We can interpret that as the subconscious self wishing that nothing should remain secret. The conscious self interprets that as a terrible threat: “You’ve hurt me badly. You’ve laughed at me behind my back.” Alma’s retaliation was terrible, even as she vacillated between attacking Elisabet and wheedling for reconciliation.
What are you hiding under your hand?
When Bergman asked for funding for Persona, he described it as a vision of two women comparing hands. Early in the film Alma compare hands with Elisabet while saying it is bad luck to compare hands. Now, as we approach the climactic denouement of the film, we see Alma’s hands prying away Elisabet’s hands to reveal what she has been hiding — the picture of her son that she has ripped into two.
Why did Elisabet reject her son? Alma has a theory and she confronts Elisabeth with it. We get this extraordinary speech not once, but twice. Once as Alma looking at Elisabeth, and once as Elizabeth looking at Alma. “…the boy was seized by a massive and unfathomable love for his mother. You resisted desperately because you felt that you could not return it. You try and try, but the meetings with him are cruel and awkward.”
We can compare the hands of the mother covering up the ripped up photograph of her son to the hand of the man with the spike driven through. This pair of images suggest the mother’s rejection of the child(and disavowal of that rejection) has turned into a spike of psychic pain that crucified the man.
To understand all is to forgive all?
As the movie draws to a close, we break narrative to see a film crew. Bergman and Sven Nykvist, his cinematographer, huddle behind a camera, with a pin-sharp image of Alma in the camera.
The film then ends with the reprise of the little boy groping towards the indistinct image of the mother, linking the little boy with Bergman. The mother that loomed so large yet so distant in his childhood has finally come into focus, through the art of filmmaking.
On interpretation
I am going to be late for work I’m sure of it. Why did I spend so many frenzied hours writing a 2400+ word dissection of a film that has been analyzed for so long by so many? Wouldn’t that time be better spent reading the analysis that has gone before? Maybe I am completely, hopelessly off-track. Or maybe I am embarrassingly, blatantly stating the obvious.
I cannot say, except this film has touched a chord inside me that caused all these cascading connections to unfold. I take that as an authentic, unshakeable relationship that I have with this work of art. This interpretation is the documentation of that relationship. To the extent it is different from what has gone before it, good. I have contributed a new perspective on a mysterious masterpiece. To the extent it echos or reiterates existing interpretations, even better. For separate minds to arrive at the same conclusions independently is the closest thing to proof we have in the hidden realm of (he)art.
