You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ida, a Polish film written and directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, is one of the most famous motion pictures of 2013. The film and its creators won many important awards in Poland and abroad including Oscar Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015.
This beautiful and moving film follows a story of two women, an aunt and her niece - a nun, who both lost their loved ones during World War II at the time of the Holocaust. Their meeting 20 years after the war initiates a dramatic attempt to face the loss and retrieve relations with good internal objects. It enables them to explore their memory and to reflect on their identity. However the experience turns out to be overwhelming and unbearable. For each woman in a different way.: memory and identity. The background of the story about Ida and her aunt Wanda are the realities of postwar communist Poland and the complex events between Polish and Jewish people at the time of the Holocaust under German occupation.
The loss of one's nearest and dearest is by itself a painful wound. When the circumstances of the loss are traumatic, the pain is so profound that it often prevents working through the mourning and parting with the object. Homicide, suicide, or death in an isolated and persecuted atmosphere, are just some examples of traumatic loss. Lacking knowledge about the circumstances of a sudden and premature death of a beloved object can be equally terrible.
In Mourning and Melancholia Freud (1915) describes the process underlying the onset of depression as the inability to accept the loss and work through the grief. He pointed out that in opposition to the loss, there operates a narcissistic identification with the lost object which replaces the loss and provides a sense of possessing the object. This way, as Freud emphasizes, “love avoids annihilation”.
However, identification with the lost object comes at a price. The price is hateful destruction of the object and thus of oneself, and staying closer to death than to the world o