Volkan’s Remarkable Application of Psychoanalysis to Society

Review of Vamık D. Volkan’s Large-Group Psychology: Racism, Societal Divisions, Narcissistic Leaders and Who We Are Now (Bicester, UK: Phoenix Publishing House, 2020), ISBN 978-1912691654, pages 139, $24.95.

It is not easy to condense 40 years of experience in studying and ameliorating ethnic conflict, 55 books, and several hundred articles into one succinct volume. Vamık Volkan has been able to achieve just this remarkable feat and brings some new things to bear on our current understanding of large-group relations.

This book was prompted by President Donald J. Trump’s remarks about the events that took place in Charlottesville, Virgin-

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ia, in August of 2017. American Nazis and other White nationalists marched in support of a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee and against African Americans and Jews. One counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 40 others were injured when a White nationalist, James Fields, Jr., ran over them with his car. Trump claimed that there were “fine people” on both sides.

This prompted Volkan to review his time in the United States and write another book trying to explain racial and ethnic conflict in terms of his large-group psychology. The book seems to have several aims. The first is a review of the basic elements of the theory of large-group psychology, beginning with Freud but more fully elaborated in Volkan’s previous work. He begins with his own personal reasons for studying large groups in ethnic conflict. Growing up a Sunni Muslim Turk on the island of Cyprus, Volkan was acquainted at an early age with the mutual antagonisms between his group and the Christian Greeks who shared the island. His personal story of the formation of his personal and group identities provides a convincing example of the important role of identity, not just in individual development, but in inter-group relations as well.

Volkan next makes a case for large-group psychology “in its own right.” By this, he means that psychoanalysts have too often viewed historical, political, and social processes as the result of projections of individuals within an individual model. Volkan makes an effective case for psychoanalytic large-group psychology that requires concepts and processes endemic to social systems themselves, apart from individual psychological concepts. His central organizing concept is identity, a term well-suited to anchor his approach because it is both a feature of the individual and the group. The first five chapters summarize his theory of large group psychology, leader-follower relationships, decision making, and political propaganda.

The next chapter summarizes the use of this large-group psychology, the Tree Model, to describe how this can be utilized to reduce ethnic conflict in hot spots around the world through consultations with the large groups involved. Volkan’s work in this area has been remarkable and worthy of the Nobel Prize nominations he has received.

The last three chapters comprise newer applications of Volkan’s model to the issue of race, contemporary world politics

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and culture, technological advances, the possible traumatic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the personality of Donald Trump. As to the last topic, Volkan explains why he turned down requests to write Trump’s biography and does not attempt to discuss Trump’s personality directly. He does, however, provide a full chapter on the characteristics of leaders with a narcissistic personality.

My expectation before reading this volume was that there would be something helpful in understanding the increasing racial animosities and tensions dividing our country. In this respect, I found the chapter on race disappointing. Volkan chose to recount his personal experiences with African Americans since coming to the United States and settling in Charlottesville. The chapter focuses mostly on his experiences as a young psychiatrist at Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, when it was a segregated mental hospital for African Americans. His observations about this hospital and how its organization seemed to mimic aspects of the slavery period are very interesting in themselves. Likewise, the recounting of his experience treating four African American teenagers when the hospital desegregated offers an important glimpse into the delivery of health care to African Americans in the rural South in the 1970s. I was disappointed that the chapter did not continue with applications of Volkan’s theories to our current racial divisiveness and particularly to an understanding of the Confederate statues as flashpoints. There is much in Volkan’s theorizing that can easily be applied to this issue.

Despite this misgiving, the book largely succeeds. It is written in plain English, free of jargon, and with many examples and stories from the author’s vast experience with patients, countries, world leaders, and most importantly, with himself as a Turk growing up in a divided Cyprus, coming to the United States, and becoming a world figure. As such, this is a book that can be read profitably by the general public, historians, and mental health workers unfamiliar with Volkan’s contributions, as well as grizzled veterans of psychohistory more familiar with his work. While much of this book covers the ground the author has traveled before in his many books, there are still new things to be learned here. For example, he discusses political propaganda in three succinct pages. However, at the end, he offers a five-stage formula for how propaganda can be harnessed to an ideology of entitlement for revenge, which can lead to ethnic violence. He utilizes his own concepts

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from large-group psychology to suggest this process. There is something new to ponder here.

Volkan is one of the most creative and inspiring psychoanalytic writers of our time. His work, inside and outside of the consulting room, deserves to be widely known. This book goes a long way in making that happen.

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