Id(e)a

Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski's 2013 film set in 1962 Poland, tells the story of a young novice who, abandoned as a child, raised by the nuns, is about to take her vows. As a child, she was welcomed into a total institution: a container that we can see as a metaphor for containers that are not “concrete,” but psychic. In her case, its rigidity is proportionate to the explosive force of emotions that, if given free rein, threaten to drive her mad. (See W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience, 1962) “Container and contained are susceptible of conjunction and permeation by emotion. Thus conjoined or permeated or both, they change in a manner usually described as growth. When disjoined or denuded of emotion they diminish in vitality, that is, approximate to inanimate objects. Both a container and contained are models of abstract representations of psychoanalytic realizations.”)

A week before taking her vows, Ida is invited by the abbess to visit her aunt, Wanda, as if to take a definitive farewell to the world outside the perimeters of the convent. This meeting offers a way to reintegrate painful aspects expelled outside herself, thus rendering her choice to become a nun more conscious. In her encounter with Wanda, Ida discovers many things about herself and her family of origin. Striving to embrace this new content, which is also potentially destructive, Ida endeavors to become more “human.”

A Polish black and white film about a young novice who is about to take her vows? Accustomed to the narrative grammar of Hollywood and more or less happy consumers of successful American television series, it would be difficult, at least for the Italian viewer, not to evoke the hero of Paolo Villaggio struggling with Ėjzenštejn. This refers to a “mythical” scene in Italian cinema in which the famous comic actor played the tragicomic figure of a humble member of the Communist Party who for once rebelled against the ideological obligation to see and applaud the Battleship Potemkin for the umpteenth time. (youtube.com)

In terms of mental health, the point is what is true, not in absolute terms, but how much truth/idea is sustainable (containable) for the individual and the group.

Instead, none of this. Having overcome our initial reluctance, we remain fascinated by the magic of great cinema. We rediscover the ways a wonderful photograph can demonstrate the most subtle emotional nuances. Ida is a complex and successful film because it effortlessly operates on various levels: the historical level, the current level of the relationship between the characters, the level of the characters seen as internal presences within Ida's mind and therefore the level of the intrapsychic, and finally the level that includes the spectator in his creative reception of the film. It is clear that the spectator films/views the film and gets filmed/viewed by it.

For the purposes of our discourse on the emotional work of analysis, we conceive of Ida as an “idea.” What we hope to do with our patients and ourselves is to have new and fruitful ideas, both rational and “sensitive,” about ways of giving meaning to life. Ida's life is the same as any new idea: She can die, live, or close herself in a claustrum. (D. Meltzer uses this Latin word that means “closed place,” then “cloister” in his 1990 work, The Claustrum (London: Karnac) to indicate a claustrophobic and constrictive psychic container.)

The film is built around binary pairs, starting with the choice to shoot it in black and white. The effect transports us to the beginning of the 1960s; by renouncing color, the director establishes a past/present opposition more effectively than a simple historical setting would do. Other binary couples include: fidelity/atheism, morality/dissoluteness, victims/butcher, communism/postcommunism, Catholics/Jews, openness/closure, spirit/body, Ida/Wanda, idea/body, virgin/prostitute, submerged/saved, asceticism/depravity, fidelity/cynicism, Catholicism/postcommunism, and guilt/redemption, illustrating how many different interpretative paths could legitimately be taken.

But what truths do these couples represent to us? The journey that Ida undertakes deconstructs rather than

strengthens these oppositions. As Dostoevsky teaches, there is sanctity in abjection and wretchedness in virtue. The past is in the present as the present is in the past. The saved become executioners and vice versa, as we see every day in so many ruined places on Earth. At this point we evoke a principle of Bion's method: the caesura seen not as a clear separation but as a transitable area and an instrument-symbol of an attitude, both ethical and epistemological, to the systematic exercise of doubt. This exercise has the precise purpose of widening the area of what we can think—host in our mind—and tolerate. In terms of mental health, the point is what is true, not in absolute terms, but how much truth/idea is sustainable (containable) for the individual and the group.

Ida “works” as a psychoanalytic journey of discovery. It expands the mind and helps us take responsibility for ourselves, or rather for the crowd of characters our minds are made of. It “looks” like a black and white film, but in reality, it is a film about life's infinite shades of gray. Nothing is ever purely black or white. Ida's emotional work, as well as the emotional work of the viewer who identifies with her, is to free oneself from the hyper-bright logic of binary oppositions.

The film-as-a-container of our anxieties, as any work of art is meant to be, presents various institutions as true characters: the convent, the party, the mind, the community, the family. Each such character is responsible for managing certain content. Some content can be potential killers, i.e., destructive. At a certain point in her life, unexpectedly, Ida is given the possibility of a change that could be catastrophic—in a sense that is not necessarily negative. Little does it matter that it was the abbess—a maternal imago or internal split object that offers to be integrated in contact with the other “maternal” aspects represented by her aunt—who invites Ida to become acquainted with her aunt. This could represent a first truth or contained waiting to be metabolized.

Between Ida and Wanda, an uneasy relationship is established. The film asks: Will Wanda become more human in/through her contact with Ida? Will Ida be able to become more human in/through her contact with Wanda? Will the mother-abbess succeed in contaminating herself with mother-Wanda?

It is a fact that, together, Ida and Wanda undertake a journey to discover Ida's family origins. As always, the essential mystery is of birth and death. Along their path, they come across several “truths” that reveal Wanda's bloody past, her miserable present, the revelation of her Jewish heritage, the Holocaust, the betrayal and murder of her parents.

In her journey, however, Ida also encounters music, Coltrane's jazz, sensuality, youth, dance, and sex. We witness as she gradually sheds features of her rigid uniform and “sees herself,” and is seen, with new eyes.

However, the aunt cannot stand the pain and takes her own life. It is as if this new trauma pushes Ida to close down abruptly and definitively, totally disillusioned and again abandoned. The new Ida, or id(e)a, who stayed in her for a while, announced the possibility of a different and fuller life but does not ultimately come alive. It is, nevertheless, true that Ida is now richer, more human and her choice represents a more mature one. Of course, Wanda represents what Ida cannot accept about herself and her aunt's suicide is the “suicide” of the cloister that Ida creates by choosing poverty, obedience, chastity, simplicity. Even if Ida does not actually open herself up to life, she will not live the same cloister she would have had she never met her aunt. Surely, there are human nuns and bad nuns, that is, doubly cloistered. From a psychological perspective, the integration abbess-Wanda, characters who somehow are the opposite of each other, has not succeeded. In fact, Ida still feels the need to renounce living a more vital and fulfilling life and sacrifices it to an inner cruel God.

As a last reflection, I would like to comment on the strength of the film. There is one element, in particular, that deserves attention. The real protagonist of the film is not actually Ida but the beautiful and expressive face of Agata Trzebuchowska, the actress who plays Ida. She is the interpretative key the director offers us. The incredible beauty of Ida's face represents the beautiful face the mother has for her newborn baby. In Ida's case, it is the face she could not sufficiently contemplate. As the film progresses, Ida's face becomes an intense and sensual presence that evokes an intolerable absence. In fact, in taking vows, she hides this face, as if Ida were enacting the absence of the other. By neither allowing anyone to gaze at her nor allowing herself to see a reflection of herself in the other's eyes, Ida's ultimate decision serves to represent this profound absence, thus containing the pain and anger that it stirs within her.

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