Listening to People through a Stethoscope

It was February 1995 and we were in Tallinn, Estonia, conducting the third dialogue workshop in a series that Vamık Volkan’s Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, The Kettering Foundation, and The Carter Center were jointly facilitating over a three-year period to prevent tensions between ethnic Russians in Estonia, Estonians, and Russians from boiling over.

This project had come about as a result of Vamık’s participation in the early 1990s in the International Negotiation Network (INN) of The Carter Center, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter. As a member of this group of scholars, practitioners, and world leaders, Vamık took part in several consultations at The Carter Center that focused on different intra-national and international conflicts. At the time, the author was Senior Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution Program that housed the INN. Following discussions, the three organizations agreed to partner in

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a conflict prevention project that would focus on Estonia.

Although I had met Vamık during my first week working at The Carter Center in January 1992 during a consultation of the INN, the Estonia project was my first opportunity to work with him. I had come to The Carter Center from Pennsylvania State University, where I had been teaching applied sociolinguistics and conducting research on negotiations. Vamık’s psychoanalytic training, his personality, and his many experiences working with people in conflict have made him a preeminent practitioner and scholar in the field of conflict resolution. He is able to gain people’s trust and apply his experiences and knowledge to help people realize their own prejudices and fears and to help them work on overcoming these limitations. Vamık’s optimism, humor, and warmth make his interventions human rather than clinical, more caring than analytical.

Vamık has served as an informal mentor to me over the past 20 years. I cannot recall any conversation with Vamık in which I did not feel supported and with new knowledge. The work in Estonia was the beginning of what has become a generous and warm professional friendship.

There were several interventions that Vamık made that still stand out to me as uniquely skilled and perceptive—something that he did as a matter of course but that many of us may only be able to do on rare occasions. These workshops were not clinical sessions; they were dialogues among healthy and productive people whose grievances against each other’s group were impeding their own personal and professional futures and the future of their newly independent country. The first incident was during the second or third workshop, when the participants had already met and gotten to know each other. Up to this point, interactions among the participants tended to be cool but polite with no outright hostility.

An Estonian man was recounting how difficult it was to live with the Russians by giving an example of a typically offensive Russian behavior. He said that when Estonians went to the beach, they carefully spaced themselves 10 meters away from the nearest person. The Russians, on the other hand, sat within a couple meters of the next person. To the Estonian telling this story, this demon-

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strated an invasion of Estonian space and a violation of, and disregard for, Estonian customs. After he finished, Vamık turned to this man and asked if he wanted to see all of the Russians exterminated. Neither he nor any of the Estonians responded to this; there was absolute silence. In this silence, the Russians could hear the depth of the Estonians’ resentment and anger over the years of Soviet/ Russian occupation of their country. By using this example to articulate the desire to rid Estonia of the Russians, and by the Estonians’ own choice not to deny this, Vamık was able to prod the ethnic Russians and Estonians to discuss and confront their hopes and fears about the other.

The second incident occurred during one of our final workshops, when we had added eight university students to our group, four ethnic Russians and four Estonians, most of whom had not met before. To help the students “bond” as a generational group rather than by ethnicity, we brought the students to the U.S. for 10 days of training. Before the students were set to go home, two of the Russian students told me that they were not going to return to Estonia, that life in Estonia offered no opportunities for Russians and that they saw no future for themselves there.

Vamık and I arranged a conference call with all of the students to discuss this development. During the conference call, when the other students found out about the “defections” of the two ethnic Russians, several of the Estonian students were very upset. Using the skills he had developed over years of psychopolitical dialogue processes with parties in conflict, Vamık was able to help the young men understand that contrary to the distrusts of the other that were ingrained in them since childhood, their past was behind them and did not have to be their future. Vamık helped them make sense of their Estonian peers’ reactions by showing them that they were seen not as the enemy, not as outsiders, but rather as peers and friends. After several hours of discussion, the two ethnic Russian students agreed to return to Estonia that afternoon with the others and to continue to take part in our dialogue process.

When the families of the students went to the airport in Tallinn to welcome them home, they were told that the authorities suspected that there was a bomb on the plane. The passengers were not told of this threat. The plane landed safely and no bomb was

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found. A few weeks later, during our next workshop in Estonia, Vamık began the conversation speaking about the bomb on the students’ plane. He said that although a bomb had not been found, there had indeed been a bomb on the plane. The students immediately understood what Vamık was getting at and agreed, saying that the two young men were the bomb because they had decided not to return to Estonia and had blown up their group.

Vamık’s ability to intuit people’s invisible, psychological wounds and his technique in using shocking metaphors served as triggers to get people to engage in a more honest conversation with each other and to better recognize in themselves the obstacles they were placing in the way of an integrated country. One of the participants, a staunch Russian nationalist who had refused to learn Estonian and had no desire to become an Estonian citizen, proudly told us at the next workshop that his daughter had just passed the Estonian citizenship exam and that he was taking Estonian language classes.

One final example occurred during a conflict assessment that several of us conducted in Albania on behalf of The Carter Center. Many Albanians had suffered greatly during Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship. In speaking with one man, he told us that his father and his brother, to whom he had been very close, had committed suicide. Vamık, seeming to go off-topic, asked if this man had a son. The man nodded, starting to cry, and said that he had a son and had named him after his dead brother. Vamık physically leaned into the conversation, asking questions, listening, nodding, and asking more questions, so that people who had been strangers 30 minutes before believed in his concern for them and shared painful stories and truths that they had long hidden away.

These examples from our work together stand out to me because they show how Vamık hears people as if through a stethoscope. He seems to hear hearts and minds from across the room and is able to see if they are healthy or at risk and what it will take to help them heal.

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