A Monumental Legacy

I write this brief essay as I stare at the serene countryside from my window in a 17^th century Jesuit abbey, La Baume, in Aixen Provence, France. The International Abrahamic Forum (IAF), a subsidiary of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), has just ended its first stand-alone annual conference here. The IAF, whose mission statement I helped craft, is co-chaired by Israeli Rabbi Ehud Bandel, ICCJ vice president, and Sheikh Ghassan Manasra, a Muslim citizen of Israel. The IAF steering committee is comprised of Dr. Mustafa Baig, a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK; Professor Heidi Hadsell, a Christian and President of Hartford Seminary, USA; and Rabbi Reuven Firestone, Professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

The IAF is moving along swiftly to build personal alliances among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, especially in Europe, based on honest conversations and willingness to expose and try to resolve cultural and political differences. They aim to build trust on the basis of the shared pro-social values of the three traditions that emphasize the individual preciousness of all our people.

The ICCJ annual meeting will start this evening (June 30, 2013), and its theme is the commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the death in Aix-en-Provence of the French Jewish historian, Jules Isaac (1877-1963). It was Isaac’s research on the “teaching of contempt,” a phrase he coined to describe the Church’s dogma throughout history to justify repression and degradation of Jews collectively and in perpetuity as killers of Christ, that had a profound effect on Pope John XXIII. Isaac had presented his findings in a meeting with the pope, who, in turn, instructed the Vatican II

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Council (1963-65) to examine the shocking evidence of how Christianity had shaped the social and cultural environment in Europe that led ultimately to the Holocaust.

We are honoring Jules Isaac because his “walk through history” (my phrase), documented beyond any doubt the record of Christian-authorized and applied anti-Judaism and, in later centuries, racist anti-Semitism. The good news is that in 1965, the Vatican II Council created the document, Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), which inter alia absolved the Jews of guilt for the murder of Christ and ordered a change in the Good Friday liturgy that had kept the lie alive over the centuries. The alliance between Jules Isaac and John XXIII fulfilled a basic function of the healing history process: acknowledgement and contrition, as explained below.

In a very basic way, I am in Aix because Vamık Volkan, my most important teacher of dynamically-oriented political psychology, figuratively sent me here. From the time I first met him in 1979 in his capacity as member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, we have been very close family friends and intellectual allies. (I have been honored with a long interview in this issue of Clio’s Psyche, so I needn’t say here how this happened.) My work with the APA committee, but Vamık in particular, taught me the critical importance of trauma in shaping the identity of large groups; the fact that time does not heal basic wounds to the self-concept; that memory of traumatic loss is transmitted from generation to generation; and until there is a reactivation to relative completion of mourning of the losses of history through a healing process, the potential for violent, pathological conflict between large groups endures.

My theory coming out of almost 35 years of psychopolitical conflict analysis and prescriptive work is reduced to the goal of facilitating an “Acknowledgement-Contrition-Forgiveness” transaction in ethnic and sectarian conflicts. Representatives of large groups—tribes or nations—who have inflicted terrible losses on other large groups, which, as a consequence, have lost all faith in the concept of justice, need to acknowledge their peoples’ moral responsibility, show remorse, and ask forgiveness. The victims may not explicitly forgive, but if the transaction is well done, there will be a perceptible, positive change in the relationship. One of

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the complications facing the facilitators is that both sides in the healing dialogue have often suffered painful losses in the relationship, or at the hands of other aggressors, and we are presented with competing victimhood psychologies. For example, in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim relationship. That’s tough. But the rule is that no wounds can go unhealed. That’s our job.

I hasten to acknowledge that Vamık’s explanations of his theories are much more detailed and theoretically rooted in scientific depth psychology. I’m an amateur. My task has been not only to distill the conclusions of my experience with dialogue groups in a way that I can understand, but also to explain them to fellow diplomats, public servants, journalists, legislators, and political leaders.

The especially good news to report is that by the time this issue of Clio’s Psyche appears, Volkan’s monumental, truly encyclopedic, magnum opus, Enemies on the Couch, will have appeared. At close to 500 pages, there is no other work that applies psychodynamic theory to large-group conflicts with so much actual reporting on the engagement of representatives of the groups in conflict. This is Vamık’s life as the leading theory-builder and practitioner of applied political psychology. I participated with Vamık in many of the engagements he describes in extraordinary, rich detail.

We started with the APA’s work to support the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement after the first Camp David meetings in 1978, and shortly thereafter added Palestinians. We began to look deeply into the psychology of identity and mourning. Together and separately, we worked on the psychological challenges of the collapse of the Soviet Union and German reunification. One of the greatest documentable successes of the psycho-political method was in helping the Baltic States and Russia divorce with a significant measure of success. Few people will be aware of the potential for violence in this process because it did not bleed and therefore did not lead in media reporting.

With his team from the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia (CSMHI), of which I was a charter member, Vamık worked on the upheavals in Roma-

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nia, Albania, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Georgia-South Ossetia conflict, and the stunning impact of malignant memory on the Serbian people so cleverly manipulated by their leaders. There are chapters on the psychology of terrorism and religion that are profound and essential for public policy. Unsurprisingly, there is a great deal of attention to Vamık’s dealing with Turkey; the Kurds; the Greeks, Armenians, and Cyprus—Northern Turkish and Southern Greek.

There are several veins of autobiographic and self-analytical gold in Enemies on the Couch that reveal the richness, complexity, and humanity of Vamık Volkan, the scholar and practitioner. I finished the book last night and concluded that Vamık is the uncontested successor to the great Erik Erikson, with whom we were both privileged to work in the 1980’s on the psychology of the U.S.-Soviet relationship at the Esalen Institute. In his psycho-political work, Vamık has taken Erik Erikson’s teachings on the political and social development of individual and social identity and the challenges of healing wounded history and added his own profoundly original contributions in a way that I believe would make Erik very proud.

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