My Life as a Psychohistorian Working for Peace (article)

I was born in 1932 to Turkish parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus—known as the birthplace of Aphrodite. The first humans on the island arrived about ten thousand years before the birth of Christ. As the centuries went by, invaders and traders multiplied. I recall finding an ancient coin and pieces of ancient pottery during my childhood while digging the ground in my father’s village. In my childhood, I was also exposed to people with different large-group identities: Cypriot Greeks, Cypriot Turks, and, in much smaller numbers, Armenians, Maronites, people who considered themselves as descendants of Phoenicians, and, of course, the British—all living side by side. Only after I started going to secondary school did I begin to wonder what history means for people with different large-group identities.

The Ottoman Turks, my ancestors, conquered Cyprus from the Venetian Empire between the years 1570 and 1571. Throughout the Venetian period, the Greek Orthodox Church was oppressed as the Venetians attempted to impose Roman Catholicism upon Cyprus. The Ottomans accepted the Greek Orthodox Church as the only non-Muslim religious organization on the island and restored

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it to its former stature. Although the island belonged to the Ottomans, on the agreement of the Sultan in 1878, the Ottomans handed over its administration to Great Britain. In return, the British helped the Ottomans defend themselves against the Russians. Even though it was considered Ottoman territory in name during this period, Cyprus was finally annexed by the British at the start of World War I in 1914. The Turkish Republic, which was founded in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, recognized British rule in Cyprus.

My mother’s grandfather, Ömer Vamık, was the last Ottoman jurist of Nicosia. He was a powerful, influential, and rich man; but when the British came, they sent Ömer Vamık to another location for an unimportant position. The family no longer was influential or rich. One of my mother’s brothers was named after his grandfather. He was found dead in the Sea of Marmara after he had gone to Istanbul to study engineering. My parents gave me the name Ömer Vamık when I was born. I am an unadulterated “replacement child.” I carry the name Ömer Vamık that belonged to both my great-great-grandfather and my uncle. As a replacement child, I was assigned from my mother’s side a duty to bring back the family’s old prestige.

During my early years, there was little violence between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks, but an outside threat reared its head. When Crete, another Mediterranean island of similar size to Cyprus, was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941, the fear was that the Nazis would come to Cyprus next. A shelter was dug in the backyard and when the sirens screamed my family would take cover there. Food was rationed and we were forced to eat dark tasteless bread. I had to learn how to put on a gas mask. While I was playing with other kids in the schoolyard, I witnessed a British Spitfire downing an Italian war plane.

I did not leave Cyprus for 18 years. I went to Turkey and studied medicine. In early 1957 I came to the United States armed with my medical degree and only $15 in my pocket, but I had a job at a hospital. I became an American citizen a few years later. My departure to the United States was part of the phenomenon known as the “brain drain.” The United States had an inadequate supply of medical doctors at this time and therefore attracted doctors from around the world. The Cypriot Greeks, who were then struggling against British rule in order to unite Cyprus with Greece, began to oppress Turkish Cypriots, as well as attack the United Kingdom’s

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forces and civilians. My arrival in America coincided with this period.

I experienced a terrible stabbing pain six months after taking up residence in America. My father sent me a newspaper clipping with very grave tidings. My roommate from the days when we lived in clapped-out lodgings in Turkey while attending the same medical school had returned to Cyprus to tend to his ailing mother. He was the nearest thing to a brother that I had. A Greek terrorist shot him seven times, killing him, in a pharmacy where he was buying medication for his mother. He was murdered in order to terrorize the ethnic group to which he belonged. After receiving the news of his death, I felt numb. I did not cry. I was in Chicago, in a foreign environment in which I was close to no one, so I did not share the news of my former roommate’s murder with any other person. My mourning process became complicated.

Growing up in a place with many historic ruins, with a childhood fear of Nazis, as a replacement child and, most importantly, being unable to mourn the death of my former roommate, these became the main influences on my involvement in international relations, paying particular attention to psychohistory and to searching for a more peaceful world when an unexpected opportunity arose.

In 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited the Knesset and famously referred to a psychological “wall” between the Israelis and the Arabs—a wall that, he stated, accounted for 70% of the problems between them. In response, the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, of which I was a member, brought influential Arabs and Israelis together for unofficial dialogues for six years to find out if this “wall” could be made permeable. In 1988, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, I opened the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) with a faculty of psychoanalysts, other mental health professionals, former diplomats, political scientists, historians, an environmentalist, and a linguist. This interdisciplinary team and I visited many areas of the world where international conflicts existed and brought together representatives of opposing large groups, such as Soviets and Americans, Russians and Estonians, Croats and Bosnians, Georgians and South Ossetians, as well as Turks and Greeks, for years-long unofficial dialogues. Our methodology became known as “The Tree Model.”

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I also studied traumatized societies such as Albania and Romania after the fall of their dictators, Enver Hoxha and Nicolae Ceauşescu, respectively, and Kuwait after the invasion by Saddam Hussein’s forces. I was a member of the International Negotiation Network (INN) under the directorship of former President Jimmy Carter for more than a decade, starting in 1989. I also have met well-known political or societal leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, and Desmond Tutu; I spent some time with them and studied the lives of other leaders, such as former President Richard Nixon, and have written their psychobiographies.

CSMHI was closed in 2005, three years after I retired from the University of Virginia. I then established the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) in 2008. IDI is a private, multidisciplinary group comprised of psychoanalysts, academics, diplomats, and other professionals who meet biannually to bring a psychologically-informed perspective to the study and amelioration of social conflict. IDI members come from Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the West Bank (www.internationaldialogueinitiative.com).

During my decades-long activities in the international arena I have learned that behind observable factors like politics, economics, and law, the central psychological factor in starting and keeping alive large-group conflicts is the protection and maintenance of large-group identity. During my work I heard the subjective experiences of such large-group identities being expressed in terms such as “We are Palestinians,” “We are Lithuanian Jews,” “We are Russians living in Estonia,” “We are Croats,” “We are Communists,” and “We are Sunni Muslims.”

Starting with Sigmund Freud, many psychoanalysts have been interested in large-group psychology. However, their focus was primarily on what a large-group means to an individual, such as an Oedipal father or a breast-mother. I began to develop a psychoanalytic large-group psychology in its own right. Large-group psychology in its own right means making formulations about the conscious and unconscious shared past and present historical/psychological experiences that exist within a large group. This is similar to clinicians making formulations about their patients’ developmental histories associated with various conscious and unconscious fantasies in order to understand what motivates certain behavior patterns, symptoms, and habitual interpersonal relationships. When I was involved in many trouble spots in the world, I had a

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historian on my team who would inform us about the history of the large groups whose representatives we were working with.

During unofficial dialogues, when representatives of one large group felt anxious they would suddenly start talking about a past historical event that had traumatized or glorified their ancestors. This led me to come up with the concepts “chosen trauma” and “chosen glory.” These terms refer to the shared mental image of the large-group’s real, fantasized, or even mythologized historical event, which, as it is transmitted from one generation to the next, undergoes a “change of function” and becomes a most significant large-group identity marker.

Reactivation of “chosen glories” increases shared narcissism invested in large-group identity. When a chosen trauma is re-activated, however, it induces a shared sense of victimization and a shared need to protect large-group identity. Such a reactivation may lead to serious obstacles in diplomatic negotiations and sometimes to new tragic historical events. I studied, for example, how Slobodan Milošević inflamed the Serbian chosen trauma—the shared image of the Battle of Kosovo—600 years after this historical event took place and how this led to new historical tragedies.

Entitlement ideologies refer to a shared sense of entitlement to recover what was lost in reality and fantasy during the ancestors’ historical trauma. Through a “time collapse,” feelings and thoughts about the ancestors’ historical event and the entitlement ideology become condensed within shared reactions toward the current opposing large-group. This makes finding a peaceful solution to the conflict between two large-groups difficult.

There are many well-established chosen traumas: Orthodox Jews still refer to the 586 BC destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. Shi’ites hold on to

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the “memory” of the Battle of Karbala that took place in 680 AD. Russians recall the “memory” of the Tatar invasion centuries ago. Czechs commemorate the 1620 Battle of Bila Hora. Scots keep alive the story of the Battle of Culloden of 1746. Some chosen traumas are difficult to detect because they are not connected simply to one well-recognized historical event. For example, the Estonians’ chosen trauma is not related to one specific event but to the fact that they have lived under almost constant domination at the hands of Swedes, Germans, and Russians for many centuries.

During his 1957 Christmas presidential address to the American Historical Association, William Langer declared that the next assignment for historians should be applying depth psychology to their work. On the other hand, generally speaking, only during the last few decades have psychoanalysts become interested in speaking about or writing about societal and political processes. I hope my decades-long work in international affairs informs psychoanalysts on their next assignment to pay attention to historians’ contributions in order to improve their understanding of large-group psychology.

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