Dr. Vamik Volkan's Sample Papers

Dr. Vamık Volkan’s keynote address on trauma, mourning, memorials and forgiveness at the Conference on the 10th Anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa.

This paper focuses on what has come to be known as unofficial diplomacy. After offering some definitions and outlining the methods of several key practitioners in the field, it will present in detail the theory and methodology of one particular approach to unofficial diplomacy—referred to as the “Tree Model”—developed by the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine. This comprehensive methodology describes a process undertaken by an interdisciplinary, neutral, third party to address problems between antagonist groups. The facilitating team includes members from the fields of diplomacy, history, psychoanalysis, and others. Psychoanalytic insights about large-group issues are at the core of the Tree Model methodology.

On June 1, 2002, about nine months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush unveiled new policy guidelines for the United States that included military pre-emption, showing “strength beyond challenge,” taking unilateral action, and extending “democracy, liberty, and security to all regions” (Bush, 2002; italics added). From a psychological point of view it is easy to see that these policy guidelines reflect omnipotence and entitlement as well as a link between an acute massive shared trauma (the September 11 attacks on American soil) and an ideological response to it (Volkan, 2006). We can also wonder if the president’s personality organization and motivations coming from his internal world influenced these guidelines. In any case, in just a few years time we would witness the limits of omnipotence and entitlement.

This paper investigates the psychological links between the development of political ideology of exaggerated entitlement such as irredentism and massive trauma that diminishes the affected large group’s shared sense of well-being and omnipotence. I use the term "large group" to refer to thousands or millions of individuals, most of whom will never meet in their lifetimes, who experience an intense sense of sameness by belonging to the same ethnicity, nationality or religion. There are various types of massive traumas. Some result from natural causes, such as tropical storms, tsunamis or forest fires. Some occur from accidental man-made disasters, like the 1986 Chernobyl accident. In this paper, by "massive large-group trauma" I refer only to injury deliberately inflicted upon a large group by an enemy group. In this type of tragedy, the victimized group, besides suffering losses and facing helplessness, also experiences shame, humiliation and an inability to assert itself. Members of a large group traumatized by “others” cannot successfully go through a mourning process over their losses or reverse their shame, humiliation and helplessness. They cannot assert themselves in socially or politically adaptive ways, and may end up internalizing a sense of helpless rage, idealizing masochism, or becoming prone to maladaptive sadistic outbursts—manifestations that are all shared by their greater community. In short, members of a group massively traumatized deliberately by an enemy group cannot successfully complete certain psychological tasks, and they then transmit such tasks to the children of the next generation(s) along with the conscious and unconscious shared wish that the next generation(s) will resolve them.

The events of September 11, 2001 have transfixed an otherwise indifferent public on the Muslim world. We hear about the training of suicide bombers, are exposed to terms like jihad—which refers to a personal struggle to reach higher consciousness but is popularly used to mean a holy war—and we connect similar activities and concepts with Islam. Before September 11th, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was often generalized as a conflict between Jews and Moslems. After September 11th, other events in the Islamic world also captured the attention of the general public in the West as well as the rest of the world to an unprecedented degree, and the divisions that these events relate have shifted the focus from divisions between Islam and Judaism. These divisions are not new. When the 1978 revolution took place in Iran, it was perceived to a great extent as a division between Shi’i Islam and the “Great Satan,” representing in our minds mostly the Christian West, especially the United States. Meanwhile, the basic origins and motives of the Iranian revolution remained obscure as they are still misunderstood by many non-Muslims, if not by many Muslims as well (MacEoin, 1983).

When a massive disaster occurs, those who are affected may experience its psychological impact in several ways. First, many individuals will suffer from various forms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Second, new social processes and shared behaviors may appear throughout the affected community/ies, initiated by changes in the shared psychological states of the affected persons. And, third, traumatized persons may, mostly unconsciously, oblige their progeny to resolve the directly traumatized generation’s own unfinished psychological tasks related to the shared trauma, such as mourning various losses. This paper focuses on the latter two expressions of the psychological impact of disaster. In particular, it addresses the impact of trauma resulting from conflict between large groups. In this context, a large group consists of thousands or millions of people, most of whom will never meet one another, who share a sense of national, religious, or ethnic sameness—in spite of family and professional subgroupings, societal status, and gender divisions—while also sharing certain characteristics with neighboring or enemy groups (Volkan, 1999a, 1999b).

Based on clinical observation of how traumatized self representations are passed from one generation to the next, a group’s involvement with a shared “memory” of a calamity and its transgen-erational transmission is explored. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a 600 year-old Serbian trauma was reactivated to provide fuel for the atrocities committed against Muslims.

A few months after the reunification of Germany, I visited a friend who lived in a town on the west side of the former East German/West German border. He asked if I would like to see the former border and then drove us to a grassy area not far from Göttingen that, prior to 1990, had been on the boundary between the two German states. My friend described how the trees had been cut down to aid the border guards in apprehending defectors. That day, of course, there were no soldiers, and the watchtowers were empty. I was, however, struck by the eerie silence of the place, and also by the way that my friend was whispering. It was as though there was still danger in this former border region. We then drove across the old border and into former East Germany, something my friend had not done since before Germany’s division. Though they had been reunited, the physical disparities between the two former countries were immediately obvious: the roads were poorly maintained and designed and even the shape of the electric poles was different. It was indisputable that we were now in a different “country.”

After the Crimean War, the Ottomans “rented” Cyprus, my birthplace, to the British, and after World War I, the British annexed the island to their empire. My mother was a descendant of a “kadi” (a Moslem religious judge) of the Ottoman period, and her family lost its fortune and prestige during the transition. My father, who came from a farm family in a Cypriot Turkish village, and my mother were both elementary school teachers and followers of the Turkish revolution that took place under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. I was born on the island in 1932 when it was a British colony, and I can remember my father’s pride and joy one day during my adolescence when my mother threw away her traditional black head cover as she stepped outside our house, thereby becoming “modernized.” Despite her family’s religious background there was no emphasis on religion in our house, and instead of receiving religious education, my sisters and I were encouraged to take violin lessons and appreciate Beethoven. My family was not alone in this cultural transformation.

Starting with Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysts have written on a variety of topics relating to the diplomatic and political realms; but thus far their contributions primarily have been theoretical in nature, and have offered little of practical use to most diplomats and politicians. Various psychoanalytic theories have been applied, resulting in diverse conceptualizations: Wars are inevitable because of our inherent aggressive drives; a nation-state serves a maternal function for its members; certain large groups exhibit behaviors similar to those of adolescents. Yet these ideas do not significantly help us understand day-to-day events around the world, practical political issues, or international relations and diplomatic decisions.

Many national or ethnic groups’ identities are represented by animal symbols. For example, the lion symbolizes British collective identity, while Turks consider the gray wolf their national symbol. This phenomenon goes back to the beginnings of human history--people have always linked their own valued or feared characteristics, and attempted to divide and order experience, through the symbolic and totemic use of animal and plants in their environment.

This is a report of how a community under social and political limitations became exaggeratedly preoccupied with the propagation and care of birds -- in this case parakeets -- in a strikingly reflection of an ancient symbolism. This unconscious dramatization of the simile “free as a bird” or “happy as a bird on the wing” adds to our knowledge of group reaction to disastrous external events of the sort that limit freedom of motion and threaten both physical and psychologic well-being.

This project aimed to draw profiles of victims and perpetrators of family violence in Turkey, Georgia, South Ossetia (with references to similar situations in Armenia and Abkhazia) by the collaborative research of participants from the above mentioned locations and experts from the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A.

This project also focused on the cultural barriers to examining family violence, especially violence directed towards women and children in the above locations.

Finally, the project’s longer-term goal was to encourage further collaborative research in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions and to aid in the development of multi-disciplinary task forces and/or organizations to bring the victims’ painful experiences and cultural dilemmas to public awareness and to generally increase open public discussions of family violence-related issues.

Opening Address, XIII International Congress, International Association of Group Psychotherapy, August, 1998.

Long ago primitive people lived in small tribes led by despotic leaders. With his unlimited power, the leader or father considered all the women of the tribe his exclusive property. If the young men of the tribe, or sons, expressed jealousy, they were killed, castrated or excommunicated. Their fate unbearable, the young men joined forces, killed the father and ate him. But the father’s influence would not disappear. In death he became more powerful.

The events of September 11, 2001 have turned our attention to terrorism, religious and ethnic identity issues, and mourning over loss. A memorial service took place on October 28 at the former site of the World Trade Center, now called “Ground Zero,” in New York. It was attended by performers and politicians, but it was chiefly for those who had lost someone when the tragedy occurred at the Twin Towers. During this ceremony, the family members of WTC victims were given wooden urns containing dust, “ashes,” from the wreckage site. The meaning of the urns was clear, as the ashes symbolically, if not literally, represented the people who had perished. The family members would have a “piece” of their loved ones. Through these they would psychologically link themselves to the people they had lost.

Since early 1970 I have collaborated with Dr. Norman Itzkowitz on various projects, ranging from an examination of the 1000-year history of Turkish-Greek relations (Volkan and Itzkowitz, 1994, 2000), to participation in unofficial Russian-Estonian dialogues following Estonia’s re-independence in 1991 (Volkan, 1997), to assessment of psychopolitical processes in the Post-Enver Hoxa Albania. This collaboration has also included our writing of two psychoanalytic biographies: one on the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Atatürk (Volkan and Itzkowitz, 1984), and the second on Richard Nixon (Volkan, Itzkowitz and Dod, 1997). It was in early 1970 that we met, at Princeton University, while participating in a meeting examining historical and group-psychological processes in the Middle East (Brown and Itzkowitz, 1977). Remarkably, though we did not know each other, both of us came to the meeting with papers titled “Atatürk and his women.” Our interest in and focus on the same topic and our identical paper titles naturally established a recognition of our shared aims and a sense of understanding between us. I am happy that our friendship and professional relationship is still going strong after more than 30 years.

In 1932 Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Sigmund Freud asking if the new science of psychoanalysis could offer insights that might deliver mankind from the menace of war. In his response to Einstein, Freud expressed little hope for an end to war and violence, or the role of psychoanalysis in changing human behavior beyond the individual level (Freud, 1932). However, even Jacob Arlow (1973) found some cautious optimism in some of Freud’s writings, Freud’s general pessimism was mirrored by many of his followers, and this fact, I think, has played a key role in limiting the contributions psychoanalysis has made to international relations in general and finding more peaceful solutions for conflicts between enemy groups in particular.

This chapter describes what I learned from my “unofficial” involvement in international relations and policies, and how the study of ethnic, national, religious or ideological large groups in turn influenced my clinical work with individuals.

Since I am a physician and a psychoanalyst, I consider the well-being of a society from a medical point of view. Long ago, the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not necessarily the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1946). It is interesting that this statement includes a reference to social well-being which directly refers to the main theme of this Second OECD World Forum. This statement describes an idealistic and perhaps unattainable view of health and raises many questions. With the theme of this conference in mind, I ask the following: What is social well-being? How do we measure or foster it? Finding answers to these questions is very difficult.