Word: bergman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...program was conceived by the Indians and encouraged by Psychiatrist Robert Bergman of the Indian Health Service. Without it the Navajo medicine man might die out, because potential students need to work at paying jobs and have no time for training. Describing the program at a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Bergman explained that the ceremonials are based on a belief that disease is "caused by disharmony with the universe, including the universe of other men." To restore harmony, a medicine man or "singer" conducts a traditional "chantway," leading the ailing victim, his relatives and friends...
Most traditional scientists look on such ceremonials as merely quaint performances that have no significant effect. But Bergman has long disagreed. He was particularly impressed six years ago when he met a Navajo medicine man named Thomas Largewhiskers, who had apparently cured a psychotic Indian woman after a modern psychiatric hospital had failed to help...
...Though Bergman admits that he does not fully understand why Largewhiskers' methods work, he offers several possible reasons. For one thing, chantways are "almost always symbolically appropriate." Pathologically prolonged grief, for instance, is "treated with a ceremony that removes the influence of the dead and turns the patient's attention back toward life...
...plus actress indeed! Ingrid Bergman's appearances on stage and screen have always elicited the highest praise from important critics and audiences alike...
TIME Critic Kalem's condescending review of Miss Bergman's deliciously droll performance as Lady Cicely Waynflete in Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion inadvertently provides a fine evaluation of Kalem himself-a D-minus critic writing for a C-plus magazine...