Inspired by his own father’s life, Ingmar Bergman offered a portrait of an elderly man who is preparing to be honored at Lund University as a very successful professor of biology and physician. “Wild Strawberries” opens with Isak Borg writing in his diary. The protagonist’s name, Isak Borg, was carefully chosen. The initials, IB, evoke the words “ice” and “borg” (fortress in Swedish) “This is why I am isolated from almost all so-called interpersonal relationships.” Like Bergman’s father (and perhaps many men whom Bergman knows in Sweden), Izak is completely fortified—what in another set of essays I have identified as the “character armor” first identified by Wilhelm Reich (1933/1980), a renegade psychoanalyst (Bergquist, 2026a).
The first dream involves a four-part encounter with objects: a clock without hands, a face without features, an unmanned hearse, and oneself lying in a coffin. The clock without hands symbolizes poor control of time. The passing or non-passing of time seems to make no difference. As I have noted, the past and present in many elderly people’s lives are easily intermixed. The faceless people would seem to represent Izak’s encounters in life; he served for many years in a professional role, yet in this role, he was treating a patient as someone to be helped rather than as someone to be fully known. The unmanned hearse might be considered a representation of Izak’s awareness, as an old man of his own mortality. The coffin is waiting there for him.
Each of these images in this first dream might be considered a product of Izak’s daytime experiences from the previous day. In preparing to be honored for his lifetime of service, Isak finds that this honoring of the past in the present time is somewhat confusing, that he is being honored for work that left him impersonally related to his patients, and his honoring is taking place in large part because he doesn’t have many more years to live. Izak’s fortress is fully fortified as he prepares for the ceremony.
The second and third dreams occur while Izak is traveling to the university where he will be honored. Like the dream-based narrative of journey that I have already featured in this essay, Izak Borg seems to have gathered new, transformative insights about himself while journeying to the endpoint of celebration. Izak is accompanied on his journey to Lund University by his pregnant daughter-in-law, Marianne, who does not appear to like him very much. Along the way, Izak and Marriane pick up three hitchhikers (two young men and their companion, a woman named Sara). Sara is adored by both men—and by Isak. She is a double for the love of Isak’s youth. He reminisces about his childhood at the seaside and his sweetheart Sara, with whom he remembered gathering strawberries, but who instead married his brother. The first group remains with him throughout his journey.
This reminiscence takes on the form of a dream, suggesting once again the permeable boundaries between the past and present, as well as between reminiscing and dreaming among the elderly. originates from Isak’s love regrets in his youth.
In the dream, Isak is portrayed as a decent, sensitive and moral person. His fortress is fully in place. He wants to read poetry, talk about sin, and kiss only in the dark. His fortress can easily push away a young woman, who, in the dream, needs love and romance. In the dream, Isak experiences a betrayal of love. This betrayal may portray a fundamental regret in Isak’s life–his later marital failure. This dream, however, also represents one of the most precious moments in Izak’s life, this being his thorough enjoyment of time with his true love in the wild strawberry field.
