Scenes from a marriage - Ingmar Bergman and love...

Käbi Laretei in a TV-programme last Monday on her new book about her marriage with Ingmar Bergman coming next month and the TV-series “Scenes from a marriage” from 1973.Also see here and here about this series.

The contracting parties were described as “the self-absorbed Johan and the self-effacing Marianne”.. Illustrated with a scene where Johan and Marianne met a therapist for the first time, and the therapist asked them to describe themselves. Johan started and expatiated himself about how fantastic he was, as a father, husband, employed, citizen etc, though with a a mix of slight self irony and seriousness. Marianne tried to intervene, lame and feeble:

“But...No... But listen...”

When it was Marianne's turn she had almost nothing to say about herself:

"Well... I am mariied to Johan... And we have two children... And... Well... I don't know what to say more..."

It was also established that the children don't exist in this series (from 1973), except from the beginning of it, compared to today when the children are at the center.

Something other people have established. Earlier (for those born 40-50 years ago or more) it was the dad who decided what the family should do: The mom helped realize and support this. Today the children decide, what to eat (parents make different dishes to the children and the parents), where to go on holidays etc.

Erland Josephson characterized the series with the words “being shut in” and “egocentricity”, not being seen by each other..

Käbi's new book has the title “Where did all this love disappear?”

When she had returned home after the funeral of Ingmar Bergman, almost two years ago now, she started to wonder “how it actually was” and recalled that she had almost 250 letters from Bergman lying somewhere, letters they wrote to each other from everywhere after their first meeting till they broke from their marriages and got married.

Bergman had visited a rehearsal in Malmö with Käbi playing the fourth piano-concerto by Beethoven, and he immediately fell in love, the start point for their relation.

Reading those letters made her surprised over the passion, a passion she had forgotten for the most part, and she got inspired writing a second book about her love relation and marriage with Bergman.

The reading of those old letters was also quite peculiar she said.

They met 1959 and broke up ten years later.

Käbi thought her pianist career was a main reason for this divorce. She couldn't think of giving her profession up and just be Bergman's wife. Not just support the genius.

The young male programme-leader also pointed out to Käbi and the audience that those letters are remarkable, that he and his generation-mates don't know how to write such paper-letters. It's quite different writing emails to each other...

I had Käbi as my piano-teacher for four years in all during my education and she awoke my "intellectual interests," and made me interested in Ingmar Bergman. She didn't only stimulate my piano-playing, but also other things...

I was struck by her continued admiration of him, an admiration that to a great part was mutual.

Their relation came to a fantastic friendship Käbi means, a friendship with both Ingmar and his last wife Ingrid.

Girlishness - a defence?

Avariciousness…

[Slightly edited October 1]. Quickly written after a long day at work: The Swedish leader-writer and priest Helle Klein writes in her blog that she thinks the economism gets both material and existential consequences.

She wonders how what’s now going on in the current financial crisis will end.

“The greediness digs its own grave – unfortunately many small-savers [??] are drawn with in this crisis.”

In a leader chronicle yesterday she writes about that “The Capitalism Destroys the Love.”

The Swedish debater and journalist Dan Josefsson said at the book-fair in Gothenburg recently that:

“Loneliness is a malignant tumour on our society.”

He and a psychotherapist have written a book together called something like “The Secrecy –from glance to lasting relation” (if we just "take ourselves in the collar" as we say here and become the clever girls and boys we will manage it!!! My interpretation from what I read about the book. Of course; all who haven't been so badly hurt will manage this, but those who were more badly treated... What about them?). Addition October 9: the home site for this book, see here.

In the book flood from this year’s fair (mass?) the need of help with relations appears. The human beings of today seem to have difficulties with the love –not with sex, kicks of happiness or enjoyment, but with lasting and deep relations.

Of 9 million people in Sweden 2, 5 million are living in one-person households. Over 1, 5 million of these have hardly any contact with their families. 200,000 say they don’t have any friends.

A lot of people call help-phones. All sorts of people are calling: young, old, people born in Sweden and abroad, men and women. Many carry a huge agony. The dismounting of the psychiatry is shown clearly. Other people are struggling with their addiction(s). Strikingly many women are drinking too much. But obviously many are merely alone. They have nobody to talk with. They are longing for connection beyond themselves.

Loneliness is the Western world’s big problem child. We have everything, but not. The affluence of things has to compensate for broken relations (but more and more people don’t have material things either, we are returning more and more to the class-society again).

However, all those offers of therapy, lifestyle coaching and self-realization say that we have to change ourselves, not the society * (the tendency to blame ourselves is strengthened! Very practical for the ones in power on all levels).

If one topic of conversation in our time is the loneliness, the other is the financial crisis. The bank system in USA is breaking down and the confidence for the societal economies is crashing.

The greediness, avariciousness has dug its own grave.

Maybe these two societal phenomena – the loneliness and the greediness - belong together?

“The capitalism is a condition in the world and in the soul”

Franz Kafka once claimed.

His provoking metaphor hold things together we use to hold apart – the economic and the existential aspects/things.

One of Klein’s teachers at the university, Per Frostin, once wrote an essay with the heading “The Capitalism Chokes the Love.”

He searched for the talk in society and church about the economism’s and consumism’s influence not only on the societal solidarity but also on our ability to maintain loving relations, enter into marriages and devote ourselves to family life.

This essay, published more than twenty years ago, feels more burning today than ever Klein thinks.

Our quarter-of-a-year-capitalism is not only a neoliberal economical system but also an ideology with a view on man which says: go in for, invest in yourself, and seek for the largest profit for your own sake.

Those ideals are the opposite of solidarity and love. The calculated egoism is breaking both the societal economies and human-between-relations down.

What has Alice Miller said about these things?? Is material things a substitute for other things? For instance love?

* In many circumstances quite moralistic - and not least unemphatic.

"I can - why can't you???"

Addition October 1: read this article too (in Swedish). And earlier posts on self-justification (the right to abuse?). And under the label moderators. See the blog Freakonomics on "In the Battle of the Sexes, Partians Outearn Peacemakers."

The American psychotherapist Jean Jenson writes that

"And the best is that the better our mental health becomes, the more we dissociate from power exercise and violence [in whatever form]."

And it was that with perverted needs and substitutes... Denial of needs "I don't need..." And as I don't have any needs I can't get hurt. And see the phenomenon divide and rule. Something we probably learned as children: siblings were played out against each other, more or less deliberately and/or consciously. A power-tool.

Read George Montbiot in "Congress Confronts its Contradictions."

How would we have reacted and resonated and how would the society and world have looked like if a sound development had occurred, i.e., if we had been truly and genuinely respectfully treated as very small kids and up? If more people had been? Because this kind of truly respectful (non-authoritarian) treatment is very rare?

A Swedish journalist said something about conservatism...

Arthur Silber wrote something interesting:

"When people say adults behave and think like children, what they more properly mean is that they behave and think like children who are profoundly damaged -- children who are already made emotionally numb by the typical kind of emotional abuse to which most children are subjected many times a day, children who have been forced to deny their own pain simply to survive, and who are therefore unable to grasp the pain of others. Most adults were once such children; one of the ways the damage reveals itself when they become adults is the denial described above... /.../

Many children believe that 'wishing will make it so,' just as they believe that there are no consequences for their actions that cannot be undone. But again, children who believe this are those children who are already damaged. Healthy children do not think in this manner. But most of us were greatly damaged as children, and most of us deny what ought to be unavoidable truths because we learned to do this in our earliest years of life./…/

…most Americans -- and our entire governing class and almost all commentators and bloggers -- refuse to grasp them. It is as if these ideas are written in a dead language. Certainly, the language is dead to them, for they have made themselves incapable of understanding it. To recognize a truth of this kind threatens the mechanism of denial that lies at the very center of their sense of themselves, at the very center of their identity. So the truth cannot be acknowledged.”

The keyword is respect…

Unlikenesses to each other (or differences) in a relation can be stimulating – so long as one respects each other (mutually).

No dating-firms (businesses) pair a meat-eater with a vegan. But in real life love doesn’t make such considerations. Some people are even drawn to what’s different (or unlike).

“It’s a question of personality,”

a female Swedish psychologist says.

“People whom are fearless or daring in their attachment style can think differences are exciting.”

And by age you can develop more and more into that direction, from being quite cautious?

During the falling in love time (or phase) differences can even be charmy. It’s not until the hormones are calming down one starts to wonder.

“How will this function?”

You don’t use your “left brain half” when you are in love. No (or little) logic thinking is involved.

Therefore one needs to sit down and resonate:

“We are very different, how shall we handle this?”

If you can solve the problems together, communicate and have a good sex life most of these things will get fixed and function. The keyword is respect.

“The best is to accept that this person is in a certain way and learn to handle this.”

With time you adjust to each other. This doesn’t have to mean compromising yourself to death, but can on the contrary (on the other hand) mean that you broaden your mind ("widen your views" or "vidgar dina vyer" as we say here in Sweden)!

“Love is to compromise a little (on the same conditions and mutually). To get a good relation you need to preserve both your own self and adjust to each other. You shall not change yourself to please, but to discover new things and have fun together.”

“But sometimes a relation with someone who is the entire opposite of oneself is entirely precarious.”

“When the differences becomes too big it ends up with that you make things with other people (maybe entirely) than with your partner – and what sort of relation do you have then?”

Miller writes about our longing for true, genuine communication. Yes, that’s what we seek, even if we aren’t aware of it or are thinking in these terms??

Read here, here and here.

Love and communication…

from a very nice walk in a stream bed...

In one of our evening papers they wrote about love, sex, and partnership a couple of days ago…

I quote from it: A cut off communication can be difficult taking up again. But it is possible, even if it demands both patience and understanding.

Things that happened here made me reflect on the topic “understanding” and forgiveness on a walk late this afternoon… I was quite upset walking in the woods. Thought on where I want to give it, of free will because a person is so important, and where I don’t really want to give it, because I am not really free to choose and have never been free choosing, but forced to understand and forgive and think on!!! Do I at last have this right? In the age I am!! Horrible it is like this! That I am still not really, really sure? Or am I, a bit more?

Lack of lust can have many bottoms, often a combination of both outer and inner factors which influences us.

Long term stress, anxiety and lack of sleep can create an undefined depression. A low self-esteem and inner demands can be reasons.

The basic, fundamental rules for communication are honesty, respect and sensitiveness for hearing. From both parts I want to add (seen to my parents’ marriage, where there wasn’t balance in that respect!!).

When you want to bring something up/about with your partner, try to start from your self, your thoughts, emotions and needs.

Describe what you appreciate and what you feel good by.

• Remember/don’t forget: to talk, laughter - and sex.
• Show consideration and solicitude. Do something that is good for your partner. A showed consideration makes a big difference and it doesn’t always have to be something magnificent to have effect. Rather small expressions of love each day than one big half a year.
• Give each other time: both you and your partner need space and time for recovery and for resting. That’s beneficial for the lust. In everyday life you can take responsibility for different days when it comes to household things. Let one evening be your own, where you yourself decide what you want to do. If you want to sleep, do exercise, meet friends or just be.
• Touch is life important. Upgrade everyday petting/necking! A kiss, a caress and a warm hand are things which gives us power and energy. It awakens desire and lust and all our senses. Everything doesn’t have to lead to sex necessarily, but being reminded about the partnership and that longing exists is beneficial.

• Be glad over the differences. You and your partner are different. Remaking (?) each other (trying to make the other person to somebody else) is nothing to aim at. Allow the differences and see them as an inspiring source to development. However, some conflicts are important clearing out. Then do this with great respect for yourself and the one you love. You ought to have the sight directed at finding a new balance in feeling well together.