Folds of Psychoanalysis

Two events created my meeting and subsequent collaboration with Vamık Volkan. The first had to do with Vamık, the second with me.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a major shift in academic departments of psychiatry in U.S. schools of medicine. Psy-

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choanalytic scholars were gradually leaving the academy and biological psychiatrists were replacing them. The School of Medicine at the University of Virginia was no exception to this upheaval. VamıkVolkan was about to accept a departmental chair at the University of Wisconsin, but Virginia’s dean could not afford to lose him.

One Tuesday morning in October 1980, I walked into Dr. Volkan’s office at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Tuesday was his “wholly intellectual day” as he once said. Accordingly, he was supervising a psychiatrist, one of his countless trainees, on a psychotherapy case. I brought him a letter of introduction from Anna Freud. In those days, after training with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Clinic, a graduate received a letter of introduction instead of a diploma.

This meeting was quite fortuitous. The result was that Vamık stayed and I joined him to create, at the behest of the Dean, the Division of Psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. The division later became the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction and was pivotal for his work in lessening interethnic and international conflict and helping to heal fractured communities.

Work with Vamık Volkan was always generative and multifaceted. We taught psychoanalysis and psychopathology to residents of psychiatry for decades. For six months in 1982, we even commuted weekly to the U.S. State Department to teach psychoanalytic thought to diplomats at the global desk. In return, we were enriched by their experience in the field of diplomacy. When the Soviet Union fell, we traveled regularly to the Baltic region to facilitate a peaceful transition between Russia and Estonia. I watched Vamık at work there and in similar contexts. I have watched him write books, chapters, and scholarly papers, all while running a hospital.

Vamık, then, is one exceptional and hugely gifted thinker and scholar-practitioner of psychoanalysis whose work with individuals in the privacy of the consulting room “folds” into the teaching of psychoanalysts. These clinical and teaching experiences then fold into work outside the consulting room, into the management

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and resolution of international conflict. Within the broader frame of his work, we see a mind that captures internal fields of reference to the outside world and, in return, a mind that pulls the fate of external fields of reference to the interior. Within the rubric of internal fields of reference to the outside, Vamık is master at observing and articulating unconscious mental phenomena and conflicts and their role in psychoanalytic understanding of psychopathology, normal and complicated mourning. Under the rubric of external fields of reference to the interior, I know of no psychoanalyst who provides as rich an account as he does about the sedimentations of history and their reactivations in derivative forms in ways that allow us to understand the intersections of individual and group psychology. There is a middle space between the internal fields of reference to the outside and external fields of reference to the inside when he mediates conflicts between fractured communities. Here, historical events get played out between us in new and contemporary ways, in palpable and tangible ways, so that we can intervene and enable communities in conflict to render their conflicts less toxic.

I get the idea of the fold from the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1998), as the trope that best describes my observations of Volkan at work. I shall paraphrase Deleuze to further comment on Vamık’s work. In Deleuze’s trope of the fold, the outside is the inside of the outside. A fold is encapsulated within a fold like a cavern inside another cavern. To unfold amounts to an operation that increases or grows. To fold amounts to an operation that diminishes, reduces, or recedes into the chamber of yet another inside world.

In Vamık’s hands, psychoanalytic and extra-analytic material constitutes an act of going from one fold to or into another fold. Representationally, the fold simulates the general typology of thought so that inside space, or more precisely, internal fields of reference to the outside, are topologically in close contact with outside space or external fields of reference to the inside. These two spaces remain in confrontation and in constant exchange at a pliable border where the inside and the outside edge towards each other in a way that causes the fold to become an event between them.

In Deleuze’s own apt words, “The outside is not fixed but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements that together

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make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside” (Foucault, 1998, p. 97).

If I have succeeded in finding the right trope to describe one practitioner-scholar’s work on individual metapsychology and group psychology and their interface, it would come as no surprise to see Vamık as the self-same person do the following: write about internalized object relations in the field of individual psychoanalysis; extrapolate salient information about leaders and their relationships with their followers; negotiate with feuding factions in ways that transform malignant conflicts into quotidian and ordinary conflicts.

To the fields of psychoanalysis, Track II Diplomacy, and mental health in general, we owe Vamık Volkan an extraordinary debt of gratitude for his unsurpassed gifts and substantive contributions as an exceptional pioneer.

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