Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

In the film Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Ingmar Bergman creates a portrait of a woman suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and does so in a way that utilizes her own perceptions as a point of view while also taking the point of view of her father, who serves as an objective point of view of what happens to the young lady and her brother. In this manner, Bergman thoroughly explores the issue from inside and out and places the viewer in the three key positions so the viewer sees the world as an observer, as the one suffering from the mental disorder, and as the relative who suffers in his own way because of the affliction besetting his daughter. Her condition is unclear in the beginning and deteriorates to the end of the film, so what we see is a young woman whose mental world is changing and isolating her from the world she has known until she withdraws from it completely.

Karin is the young woman. Her father is a writer who has spent some time abroad and who has recently returned to a summer house on the Baltic. Karin is married to Martin, a medical doctor, while her brother, Minus, is encountering difficulties in puberty and has turned his problem into self-disgust. The relationship between Minus and his sister becomes incestuous, which only contributes to her deterioration while somehow allowing him to find a new rapport with his father and a new and stronger sense of self. This family is a self-contained unit and is examined as such so that we are not analyzing

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est results, behavioral abnormalities, and unusual perceptual experiences (Silverstein et al. 265). An examination of the literature shows that the schizophrenic is indeed identified by many researchers and theorists according to the perceptions of the individual suffering from this illness, but at the same time it has been shown that many of the characteristic perceptions attributed to the schizophrenic are not exclusive to the schizophrenic but are manifested in other segments of the population as well. Yet, there are observable changes in the personal field of meaning for these patients that can help identify them as schizophrenics and that links them with other sufferers. There seem to be several different types of schizophrenics when classified in this fashion, or perhaps the research is simply not yet sufficient to determine the causal connections between different perceptual problems that seem to differentiate schizophrenics both from the general population and from each other. According to the DSMV-IV, there are different forms of schizophrenia, not all of which are as debilitating as others. The symptoms have to have been apparent for at least a month. The positive symptoms are those that seem to reflect an exces

Category: Film - T