Vamık Volkan’s Willingness to Wade In

The skyline of Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, assaults your vision. The beautiful landscape that surrounds the city remains at arms’ length from large cement apartment buildings that stand as dilapidated monuments to the Soviet era. All the buildings appear to be on the verge of collapse, and to Western eyes, they look uninhabitable and in dire need of demolition. Yet, appearances deceive. Once you climb the unlit stairwells and enter an apartment, an entirely new world appears. The citizens take pride in airy, clean, simple, and beautifully appointed rooms. You quickly accommodate to the black market electric cords that cross the floors to provide electricity when the public utility cuts out, a frequent daily occurrence. Even the black market power is unreliable. Yet amidst these strains, hospitality continues as a cherished aspect of the national culture, and you soon feel at home.

The physical reflects the emotional. Deep inside a society that survived the destructiveness of almost a century of Soviet rule, Stalinism, economic collapse, disintegration into warring ethnic factions, transition to a sovereign state, and crippled entry into the Western capitalist world, you can find hope amidst the ruins. That hope is shackled by unconscious conflicts that arose out of history and ethnic enmity. One of the lasting contributions of Vamık Vol-

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kan is the applied analytic understanding of political group conflict. That understanding holds out the possibility of unburdening such hope as we found in Tbilisi in order to end political conflicts that threaten stability and recovery in traumatized societies.

I had the privilege of training under Vamık and working with him during the life of his Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, Virginia. The teams he assembled conducted projects in Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, Kuwait, the Republic of Georgia, and South Ossetia. Individually, he has traveled the world and been part of conflict resolution efforts in Africa and the Middle East. His personal journey and efforts are chronicled in Enemies on the Couch. My desire is to distill some of the crucial elements that make Vamık’s accomplishments unique.

First is a grounding in psychoanalysis and a view that much of mental life is unconscious and the residue of history, the personal and cultural history of the peoples in conflict. Second is an openness to bring in other disciplines: historians, politicians, political scientists, and especially professional diplomats with experience in negotiation of international conflicts. Third and most important is a willingness to wade in. By this, I mean both at a physical level and at the level of deep interpersonal connection.

When possible, we stayed with host families. Forever in my memory is a meeting at an unnamed U.S. government office abroad, located in the back third of the nicest hotel in an impoverished city. The U.S. government representative asked where we were staying. When we said we were living with the citizens in the NGO with whom we collaborated, he insulted us, including one of our local hosts sitting in front of him, with his response. “You are living with them? In their homes?” When we stayed in hotels, they were simple and close to our host NGO personnel. To the degree possible, we tried to enter into the lives of our partners. That is certainly common with conflict resolution projects. But, what was different was Vamık’s willingness and skill to become even closer, to wade into the unconscious conflicts, the chosen traumas and chosen glories of individuals. In conflict resolution projects, he always interviewed in great depth. There was never any staying at the surface.

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In Georgia, there are people who are refugees in their own country, called “Internally Displaced People” (IDPs). Few could have drawn out the rich and crucial dynamics by which these poor people, fellow citizens of the same ethnicity, became reservoirs of projections from their fellow countrymen. Vamık’s interviews of those people are as vivid today as when I witnessed them.

Another memory remains vibrant. A fellow psychiatrist, Dr. Gregory Saathoff, and I were part of Ambassador Nathan Howell’s project in 1993 post-Gulf War Kuwait. Greg and I returned from a trip after conducting numerous interviews with a broad range of Kuwaiti citizens. Vamık traveled there before us and had a sense of the people, the history and the place. We presented our interview data to him one evening in his home. Vamık waded in and took our formulations to another and deeper level. Those formulations became central to the report we submitted to the Kuwait government.

I am a working psychiatrist, not a scholar. My suggestion to anyone reading this brief tribute is to read Vamık’s papers, books, and memoir. You will see better than I can ever describe his courage and skills to delve directly, person to person, into the psyches of people in political conflict, maybe deeper than anyone before him. With his model, perhaps others will have the willingness to wade in and bring to light the unconscious turmoil that so often creates barriers to durable peace. Let’s hope so.

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