Word: bergmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...accomplished can be seen in a delicious parody called Death Knocks, Woody's screwball homage to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. In Allen's piece, the game is not chess but gin rummy, and the role of the crusader is played by Nat Ackerman, a dress manufacturer. Death refuses to pay for his losses. "Why should you need money?" Ackerman inquires. Death: "What are you talking about? You're going to the Beyond-you know how far that is?" Ackerman: "So?" Death: "So where's gas? Where's tolls...
...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...
Besides, says Bergman, Navajo medicine has much in common with psychoanalysis. Both have an "ordered method of establishing intense, helpful relationships" between doctor and patient. And both are based on a belief that much behavior is shaped by unconscious processes. "There is a part of the mind that we don't really know about," Largewhiskers told Bergman. "That part is the most important in whether we become sick or remain well...