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An Ode to Ambivalence: Reflections of a Documentary Filmmaker
from Division Review
by Ofra BLOCH
In the beginning there was a sea of endless blue in my mother’s eyes, and I drowned in it. When she would shut her eyes hoping for an afternoon nap, I would gently pull her eyelashes and separate her lids so that the blue would reappear, and I could continue to be. On rainy days she would suggest that we leave our umbrellas at home and take a walk between the drops, so we wouldn’t get wet. She was a magician and I believed everything she said. The biggest gift a parent can give her child is the permission to go. She never did and when she developed an illness that impaired her cognition, I felt I didn’t have the right to go on with the act of living without her. This is how I landed in analysis and embarked on the long struggle of differentiating.
I often wondered about what prevented my mother from allowing me to fly the nest. Probably her mothering was influenced by the loss of her own mother at the age of two, along with the experience years later of being told by a stranger that the woman she called mom was actually her stepmom. It wasn’t just a case of her becoming the mother she thought she needed to be for me. It was more about what she lacked and about what I needed to be for her.
The seven years it took to make my documentary Afterward allowed me the opportunity to radically listen to those I was raised to regard as an other - the Germans and the Palestinians. In my encounters, I experienced being in the role of both victim and victimizer and was forced to face my own implication in the Occupation, even after living for 40 years in the diaspora. However, it was the reactions to my film in the last four years, since its completion, that made me think of my mother’s experience and its impact on me through a different lens.
When I discuss the reactions to my documentary, I don’t focus on the people who liked the film or those who didn’t. I focus instead on a distinct group of people who would ordinarily be drawn to the topic of the documentary but who refused to watch it as if “on principle.” This group of individuals isn’t confined to one nationality, gender, religion or race. I have wondered for some time about what it is that unified them. It seems to me that the common denominator was their difficulty in handling ambivalence.
Afterward is all about ambivalence. The film points to a future—an “afterward”—that attempts, without polemics or false equivalencies, to live with the truths of history in order to make sense of the present. Without being able to tolerate conflicting feelings, to hold more than one emotion at a time, or to live with uncertainties, confusion and hesitation, there is no space in which to invite the other to begin a dialogue.
What is it about the experience of feeling ambivalent that makes it into an unbearable endeavor?
The poet Adrienne Rich described the suffering of ambivalence as “the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.” (Rich 1976). While the opinion columnist Anna Quindlen wrote, “We don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage for our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.” (Quindlen, 2010). I felt a wave of fresh air when I read this quote from the writer Erica Jong, “Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.”
Growing up, my mother didn’t experience being on the mind of her mother, or any other for that matter. During her childhood no one took an interest in her internal life or showed the capacity to understand her feelings and wishes, and it was left to me to repair her eroded epistemic trust. Being deprived of ongoing mentalization likely shaped her attachment style and impaired her capacity to be alone. When she had a daughter, it was as if she discovered her own essence or perhaps got to have an identity beyond being an orphan. She needed me in order to have meaning and identity, and I in return, felt as if we were one. We shared a world of radical dependency, in which we belonged to each other. Absent was the sense of having a secure base to which I could return if I dared to individuate and explore the world. In the confines of such a straitjacket, there was no space for me to experience her contemplation of me, without which I couldn’t differentiate from her, and therefore was never able to internalize her.
The unconscious rigid structure that was formed between my mother and me was an example of our instinctual need for belonging. The process of becoming a defined group is similarly based on a particular bond among group members who share identity or adhere to similar beliefs and social structures. However, when a group is characterized by a total enmeshment with a strict definition of their belief system, it can generate feelings of insecurity and anxiety within the group. The group then reacts by establishing strictly delineated, external boundaries in order to protect itself from being exposed to the outside world. This rigidity can lead to the development of a false world where there is a space for only one truth and a profound fear of the germ of any other truths. It consists of ‘good-us’ and ‘bad-them’ and people, ideas and actions aren’t judged on their own merit, but whether they represent them or us. The absence of any other perspectives furthers isolation, so working through and using mentalization to transform and change become impossible.
Recently, a German member of a non-governmental peace organization arranged a virtual screening of Afterward. The organization trains German, Palestinian, and Israeli young adults to work together to promote peace by providing them with opportunities for encounters. The hope is that by experiencing mutual understanding, respect and acceptance, they will become agents of peace in their respective societies. The audience that attended consisted of Germans, two Israelis and no Palestinians. Most of the Israelis and all the Palestinian members refused to attend the screening and the discussion that followed. I assume that their entangled traumatic past orients them to react with anxiety, avoidance and dissociation in response to exposures to particular triggers. This avoidance occurs despite the fact that the members of this organization had committed themselves to dialogue with each other and they have been listening to each other for many years.
A similar experience occurred when Afterward was screened at Solidarity – Tel Aviv Human Rights Film Festival. Some of my friends who identify with both extremes of the political map in Israel mysteriously declined invitations to attend. Though they differ in their political viewpoints, they were united in their fear of being presented with a personal documentary that doesn’t take sides, that isn’t pro-or-against, but rather attempts to navigate the labyrinth of conflicting emotions when faced with reality on the ground. However, I can clearly remember times when I didn’t take on the effort to understand the other, when I too the felt comfort in belonging to a cohesive group that firmly believed that their truth was the only just one, and how the goal of holding many perspectives was difficult for me as well.
There is a moment in Afterward in which I can be seen walking in the Old City of Jerusalem as Muslims were thronging the narrow streets towards the Al Aqsa Mosque for the Friday prayer. The Friday before we filmed that scene, an Israeli Jew walking the same path was knifed. I vividly remember asking the Palestinian assistant producer to speak to me in English, feeling some trepidation about being identified as an Israeli Jew if we conversed in Hebrew. A moment before, I felt appalled and enraged by the presence of so many armed soldiers, and at the same time I caught myself thinking that I did not want to die and that perhaps it was a good thing that the soldiers were there to protect me. I felt ashamed for worrying about my own personal safety.
On another occasion, I strolled by the walls of Aida, a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem, which were covered by life-sized stenciled images of people who are thought of as murderous terrorists by Israeli Jews and as freedom fighter and martyrs by Palestinians. I believe in non-violent resistance and oppose the view that the liberation of the oppressed requires shedding the blood of the oppressor. Therefore, it wasn’t easy to connect with the part of me that could imagine the level of desperation of the people behind those images. I found myself able to envisage how people who live under occupation and experience ongoing humiliation and violence without any change in sight could end up picking up arms. But at the same time, I was also in touch with the part of me that felt a strong sense of fear and terror, along with an intense rage at the Palestinians for killing my people. It was then and there that I could see with clarity that both reactions to those experiences were legitimate, and one did not cancel out the other. As challenging as it was for me at that moment, I found myself able to live with my own ambivalence.
I discovered a quote by the psychoanalyst Otto Rank that spoke directly to my newly acquired way of thinking. Otto Rank didn’t ignore the challenge of living with ambivalence, but he regarded it as an essential component of meaning in life: “For the only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life”. (Nisenholz, 2011).
The road for both individuals and groups towards making good use of ambivalence weaves through the thorny fields of mentalization. It is the ability to mentalize an other and vice versa, the experiences of having an other imagine your own thoughts, feelings and perspective, which provides us the space to mourn our original symbiotic state. It helps us move out of the pulls of cohesive identity, which serves as a narcissistic shield from the other, be it humans, or inanimate ideas. In this protected narcissism, we split the world between all-good and all-bad. When individuals and groups adhere to one truth as if it were one-size-fits-all, they feel threatened by revelation of other truths or discussions about nuances of experiences and memories. They are more likely to apply measures that keep them safe in their extreme position, such as self-censorship and avoidance of exposure to ideas that challenge their own.
One could argue that the group of people who formed such a strong opinion about Afterward without even watching it was actually expressing its own state of epistemic mistrust. Mistrust can prevent them from being able to mentalize an other who expresses ideas that stray away from their core beliefs and ideologies. When a group is locked in such a stance, its members might inadvertently become attached to the status quo, and experience change and transformation as loss and defeat, and thus hinder any possibility for constructive dialogue.
Afterward premiered in DOC NYC of 2018 and was screened in twelve film festivals in the US, at the UN Correspondents Association, and to theatrical audiences in New York, Los Angeles, and a few other cities, receiving excellent reviews. In addition, it won awards for its social impact. After COVID-19 interfered with our plans, Afterward joined the virtual world. There were numerous virtual screenings in various communities, including psychoanalytic institutes, and the film can be seen on several streaming platforms around the world. It now has a life of its own.
My dream was for Afterward to be shown in New York, Berlin, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. Unfortunately, my dream came true only in the case of New York. Palestinian individuals thanked me after screenings with teary eyes and expressed a wish to screen it in their communities, yet I never heard back from any of them. Palestinian film festivals that considered screening Afterward informed me that it wasn’t pro-Palestinian enough. The Jewish response was even less enthusiastic. Some were distressed because the film wasn’t pro-Israeli enough. Others were upset because the film failed to denounce Zionism, and still others felt enraged believing that I was comparing the Nakba to the Holocaust, an act regarded as blasphemy in certain circles that cling to exclusiveness and have no space for the suffering of others. Only the San Francisco International Jewish Film Festival dared to screen it. The three main film festivals in Israel rejected Afterward though they definitely don’t shy away from screening films deemed pro-Palestinian. Afterward finally had one screening in Solidarity, a human rights festival in Tel Aviv. Attempts to screen Afterward in film festivals in Germany had the same fate, but recently the film was picked by a German streaming company that is showing it in six European countries.
Given the praise the film received for its artistic merit, I believe that the main hurdle we faced in circulating Afterward was that it did not take sides. I was not interested in taking sides and the team that helped me make the documentary supported this perspective. The film didn’t aim to convince or change minds, but it did advocate for wrestling with ambivalence and for listening to the other as a step that could lead to dialogue. Yet Afterward did indicate that in encounters between Israelis and Palestinians, the role of ‘first listeners’ ought to be taken by the Israelis. I believe that only after the oppressed get to share their pain and suffering with those who have oppressed them and feel truly heard, can they be inclined to find space in their hearts to listen to the experiences of past victims turned present-day victimizers.
In his book, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology (2019), Gaztambide writes about the fallout of political trauma, which isolates minds and results in mistrust and vigilance, leading to the creation of a rigid cognitive-emotional stance that interferes with the ability of the individual and the group to take in new information. He states that when individuals, communities, or political systems fail to provide mentalizing spaces, this instigates the crumbling of epistemic trust, preventing any working through of the trauma. Gaztambide speaks of how a humanizing dialogue can create a sense of agentic self and provide us with an experience of receiving subjectivity and reflection from an other, so we are able to mentalize and trust the other as well.
Epilogue: The blue of my mother’s eyes, and the maternal containment it represented, created a world of ultimate interdependence and an illusion of an eternal and exclusive belonging. After my mother died, I turned to psychoanalysis to understand that illusion. In the course of my long analysis, the therapeutic dyad went through various configurations of maternal transference and countertransference. I learned to understand myself, my inner life, and my experiences in a deeper way, while also gaining the ability to see the (m) other as a separate and complex agent.
I believe that it was during the experience of my analysis that I developed my ability to tolerate having different feelings concurrently and holding them in tension. The making of Afterward was both a reflection of that ability and a creative endeavor that helped me to explore the importance of tolerating ambivalence for intergroup dynamics and my own internal conflicts. I view the process of strengthening my ability to handle ambivalence as an ongoing challenge that is critical to my closeness with others.
Forty-two years ago, I moved 5,694 miles away from my mother and immigrated to the United States. I never consciously viewed my immigration to another continent as an effort to lead a separate life from my mother, but I am certain that the distance was an attempt to lovingly differentiate. It is only of late that I realized that physical distance isn’t a magical tool in that effort. During a period in the last year when I seriously considered terminating my treatment with my analyst of 30 years, it dawned on me that perhaps in order to fully differentiate, there is no need to run away. On the contrary, I needed to stick around and weather the difficulties of the relationship and achieve separateness and a reciprocal regard in the context of the mutual gaze.
References
Erica Jong Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: https://www.brainyquote. com/quotes/erica_jong_137089
Gaztambide, D. J., (2019) A people’s history of psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Lexington Books.
Nisenholz, B., (2011) Sigmund says: And other psychotherapists’ quotes. iUniverse.
Quindlen, A., (2010) Thinking out loud: The personal, the political, the public, and the private. Ballantine Books.
Rich, A., (1976) Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. Norton.
