Volume 20 Number 2September 2013

accordion phenomena, chosen glory, chosen trauma, conflict resolution, entitlement ideologies, ethnic tents, festschrift, leader-follower relations, linking objects, political psychology, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, time collapse, Tree Model, Vamık Volkan

This article is the editor’s biographical introduction to a festschrift honoring Vamık Volkan, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. The author, Paul H. Elovitz, recounts Volkan’s birth in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1932, his medical education at the University of Ankara, his move to the United States in 1957, his psychiatric and psychoanalytic training, and his eighteen years as a hospital administrator at the University of Virginia. It lists his current academic and institutional appointments and his 2013 schedule of lectures, workshops, and consulting in Europe and the United States. It also names his roles in the International Society of Political Psychology, the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction and its journal Mind and Human Interaction, and the International Negotiation Network. It reports that he has produced 58 books, including the forthcoming autobiography Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey through War and Peace, and over 350 articles and chapters. Concepts associated with him include chosen traumas, chosen glories, large-group theory, linking objects, time collapse, and Track II Diplomacy. The author attributes Volkan’s interest in group identity and enmity to his upbringing in the Turkish minority in Cyprus and to his family’s experience of the island’s political struggles. The introduction is admiring in tone and concludes by pointing to the esteem in which contributors hold him and to the peacemaking work that he and many of them have undertaken.

Anwar Sadat, Arab-Israel wars, Egypt, festschrift, informal diplomacy, international relations, interview, Israel, large-group belonging, Palestinians, peacemaking work, psychohistory, psychological wall, unofficial dialogues

This festschrift article is an interview with Vamık Volkan, conducted by Molly Castelloe with further questions from a second interviewer, about his work in informal diplomacy and political psychology. Volkan recounts what drew him to international relations: a 1979 statement by Anwar Sadat, unofficial Arab–Israeli–Palestinian dialogues held under an American Psychiatric Association committee, and his childhood in wartime Cyprus. His evidence is his own clinical, field, and personal experience. He explains his concepts of linking objects, mourning as a continuing relationship with a mental double, chosen trauma, large-group identity, hot spots, and time collapse. He illustrates them with the Crying Father monument in Tskhinvali, South Ossetia; Paldiski, Estonia; a proposed exhumation in Latvia’s national cemetery; and caged birds among enclaved Cypriot Turks. Volkan maintains that Slobodan Milošević reactivated the Serbian chosen trauma of the Battle of Kosovo in 1989 through the exhumation and ceremonial procession of Prince Lazar’s remains. He contends that large-group identity is the most important factor in international relations. He also describes his work with World War II orphans in the United States, a bus project in a segregated area of Richmond, Virginia, with Maurice Apprey, and transgenerational transmission as treated in The Third Reich in the Unconscious. He concludes that psychoanalysts should study large-group processes in the field with the devotion given to individuals. He disputes demands for evidence-based measurement of unconscious processes and urges that large-group psychology be brought to diplomats and politicians.

festschrift, Near-Eastern Studies, Princeton University, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychological dimensions, University of Virginia Medical School, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, the author offers a personal tribute to the psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan, recounting their friendship and collaboration from 1973. The author recalls meeting Volkan at a Princeton conference on “Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies,” where Volkan explained a developmental concept, which the author presents as D. W. Winnicott’s account of symbiosis, separation, and individuation, by contrasting how an American and a Turkish mother might respond when a toddler falls. The author then describes the two men’s early shared work on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the interdisciplinary group Volkan formed at the University of Virginia School of Medicine to work with people abroad on psychoanalysis, politics, and government. The author recounts approaches to the Soviet Union, Lithuania, and Latvia that did not go forward, and the welcome the group received in Estonia. The author lists their joint books: a 1994 volume on Turkish-Greek relations, a 1997 psychobiography of Richard Nixon co-authored with Andrew W. Dod, and The Immortal Atatürk (1984). The author is admiring of Volkan, judges that he merits the honors he has received, and names their friendship as his own reward.

Charlottesville, Cyprus, doctoral degree, festschrift, friendship, psychiatry, psychobiography, psychohistory, University of Virginia, Vamık Volkan

In this article, part of the tributes in the festschrift honoring Vamık Volkan, the author, a Turkish Cypriot politician and former Foreign Minister of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, writes from a personal acquaintance with Volkan, a fellow native of Cyprus, that began in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1965 and has lasted almost fifty years. The author recounts a meeting at Pennsylvania State University after Volkan’s 1968 visit to Cyprus, where Volkan described the parakeets Turkish Cypriots kept in cages while confined to enclaves after the violence of 1963. According to the author, Volkan explained, as in Cyprus: War and Adaptation (1979), that the birds represented externalized parts of the people themselves, and predicted that they would disappear once freedom of movement returned. The author reports that this had happened by Volkan’s 1973 visit. He describes this episode as decisive for his political life from 1974, and says Volkan’s theories of large-group psychology have been his reference point in UN-sponsored negotiations with Greek Cypriots. He contends that political leaders can manipulate large-group behavior, and maintains that Volkan’s work explains why Cyprus remains divided. The author argues that this work should be a foundation for policy makers, diplomats, and everyone engaged in peacemaking. He is admiring of Volkan’s energy, worldwide travel, and dedication, and concludes that Volkan built a needed bridge between behavioral science and political science.

festschrift, France, International Abrahamic Forum (IAF), International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), international relations, Israel, legacy, psychohistory, psychology of religion, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, a tribute to Vamık Volkan, the author writes from a Jesuit abbey in Aix-en-Provence on the eve of the 2013 annual meeting of the International Council of Christians and Jews, which commemorates the historian Jules Isaac. The author describes the first stand-alone conference of the council’s subsidiary, the International Abrahamic Forum, which he helped establish, and recounts how Isaac’s research on Christian teaching about Jews influenced Pope John XXIII and the declaration Nostra Aetate. He presents their alliance as an instance of acknowledgement and contrition in a healing-history process. He names Volkan as his most important teacher in political psychology since they met in 1979 through the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs. He credits Volkan with teaching him that trauma shapes large-group identity, that time does not heal such wounds, and that unmourned historical losses are transmitted across generations and sustain the potential for violent conflict. He outlines his own approach, which aims to facilitate acknowledgement, contrition, and forgiveness between groups, and notes the complication of competing victimhood. He then describes Volkan’s forthcoming book Enemies on the Couch, which he says covers engagements in which he took part, among them post-Camp David dialogue, the Baltic States and Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia, Turkey, and Cyprus. He concludes that Volkan is Erik Erikson’s successor in this field.

Baltic Republics, Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI), festschrift, post-Soviet Russia, psychopolitical collaboration, religious studies, University of Virginia, Vamık Volkan

In this article, written for the Vamık Volkan festschrift, the author, a humanities scholar and Presbyterian minister, recalls his work with Volkan as Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at the University of Virginia from June 1991 to October 1993. He describes his duties: grant writing, daily management, organizing visiting speakers and conferences, and preparing psychopolitical meetings between representatives of the Baltic Republics and post-Soviet Russia in Kaunas, Lithuania (1992) and Riga, Latvia (1993). He recounts learning psychoanalytic theory by sitting in on a graduate class taught by Volkan and Maurice Apprey, listening to visiting speakers, and co-authoring with Volkan. Their joint work includes “Negotiating a Peaceful Separation: A Psychopolitical Analysis of Current Relationships Between Russia and the Baltic Republics,” a report on the Kaunas meeting in Mind and Human Interaction, and a second report on Riga. With J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., they also produced two monographs, on ethnic terrorism and on Western European neo-racism. He describes the drafting method, in which Volkan’s handwritten installments were rendered into accessible prose. He then notes his later move to the Wisconsin Humanities Council and a 1995 Milwaukee meeting he arranged with the CSMHI team, and says that Volkan’s ideas still inform his research and conversation, citing his recent use of the concept of chosen trauma in discussion with a colleague.

Arab conflicts, Arab-Israel wars, de-escalation of international conflict, festschrift, group process, International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), Mind & Human Interaction, scholarship, Sigmund Freud, Vamık Volkan

In this article, part of the tributes in the Vamık Volkan festschrift, the author offers a personal appreciation of Volkan’s career and of the author’s own association with him. The author recounts Volkan’s Turkish Cypriot upbringing and his founding of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction and its journal, Mind & Human Interaction, at the University of Virginia. The author also covers his posts as Sigmund Freud Visiting Scholar in Vienna and Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center, his part in founding the International Society of Political Psychology, and his Track II Diplomacy work in Israeli, Egyptian, and Arab conflicts. The author names Cyprus—War and Adaptation: A Psychoanalytic History of Two Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1979) as a personal favorite. The author describes its attention to childhood, family structure, and symbolic practices, and reports Volkan’s observation that similarities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots outweigh differences inflamed by projection, war, trauma, and hatred. The author recalls shared visits in Istanbul, Ankara, northern Cyprus, Vienna, Charlottesville, Stockbridge, and Los Angeles. The author concludes that a psychodynamic approach to conflict is essential to international accommodation and security, regards Volkan as its pioneer and guide, and expresses respect, gratitude, and affection for him.

contemporary psychoanalytic literature, festschrift, legacy, psychiatry training, psychohistory, University of Virginia, Vamık Volkan

In this article, part of the festschrift for Vamık Volkan and its section of tributes, the author, a psychiatrist, recounts his association with Volkan, beginning almost forty years earlier in his psychiatry residency at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He describes choosing psychiatry over surgery with little knowledge of contemporary psychoanalytic literature, hearing Volkan spoken of admiringly before meeting him, and competing with fellow residents for supervision. He recalls waiting a year and a half for personal supervision in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and Volkan’s annual courses, including their treatment of pathological grief and trauma. The author credits these with shaping his later career, and describes staying in contact after analytic training in Philadelphia. He is admiring of Volkan and expresses gratitude for their deepening friendship.

conflict resolution, ethnic conflict, festschrift, large group dynamics, legacy, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, social trauma, Vamık Volkan, violence prevention

In this article, part of the festschrift honoring Vamık Volkan, the author offers an appreciation of Volkan’s work and argues that he merits the Nobel Peace Prize. The author describes Volkan’s move from psychoanalysis and psychiatric administration into work on large-group ethnic conflict and social trauma, and lists his engagements with Arabs and Israelis, Soviets and Americans, Estonians and Russians, Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks, Georgians and South Ossetians, and Turks and Greeks, as well as with post-war Albania and Kuwait. The author links this work to Volkan’s birth as a Muslim Turk on Cyprus. Discussing The Third Reich in the Unconscious, written with Gabriele Ast and William F. Greer, the author reports Volkan’s proposition that trauma persists where a large group cannot mourn its losses and defeats, and says this proposition informed the author’s own work on Holocaust history and Jewish cemetery restoration in Eastern Europe. The author contrasts Freud’s pessimistic 1932 reply to Einstein with Volkan’s work since the 1970s, contending that Volkan has extended Freud’s ideas about war. The author concludes by stating that he has urged the Nobel Committee to consider Volkan, and describes an award as an affirmation of hope, healing, and the capacity of one person to contribute to peace.

Bridge on the River Kwai, cinema, David Lean, Dr Zhivago, festschrift, geo-historical, interdisciplinary, mourning, A Passage to India, psychohistory, Robert Altman, Ryan’s Daughter, storytelling, Vamık Volkan

In this article, a tribute in the Vamık Volkan festschrift, the author imagines a film of Volkan’s life and proposes David Lean or Robert Altman as director. The author contrasts Lean’s panoramic historical settings with Altman’s ensemble storytelling and suggests the two might collaborate. The author then surveys three phases of Volkan’s career: early work on borderline, narcissistic, and schizophrenic patients, including Primitive Internalized Object Relations (1976) and Six Steps in the Treatment of Borderline Personality Organization (1988); research on normal and pathological mourning, culminating in Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena (1981); and, from The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (1988) onward, work on ethnic identity, international conflict, Track II diplomacy, and large-group psychology, including Bloodlines, Blind Trust, and Killing in the Name of Identity. The author credits Volkan with introducing concepts such as chosen glories, chosen traumas, and the ethnic tent, and mentions his co-authored psychobiographies of Atatürk and Richard Nixon, his work with local professionals and political leaders in conflict regions including Albania, Azerbaijan, Israel, Estonia, Latvia, and Georgia, and two Nobel Peace Prize nominations. Writing as a former supervisee, the author is admiring of Volkan as teacher and mentor, characterizes his encouragement of younger colleagues through Erik Erikson’s concept of generativity, and notes his friendships across many countries. The author closes by repeating that Lean and Altman would compete to tell his story.

Austen Riggs Center, clinical education, Eric Peters, festschrift, group work, internal life, interview, psychohistory, supervisee, supervision, Vamık Volkan, visionary

This article, part of the festschrift for Vamık Volkan, presents a short interview in which the author, Molly Castelloe, asks Eric J. Peters about his 2011 supervision with Volkan at Austen Riggs in Massachusetts. Peters credits Volkan with helping him connect clinical and group work, with an intuitive grasp of a patient’s inner life, and with teaching him to place himself within a patient’s internal world. He describes Volkan as a direct teacher who asks for a life history and redirects quickly. Peters acknowledges that some people call this approach narrowly focused, but he reports finding it useful rather than limiting. He also describes Volkan’s kindness toward patients. Asked how Volkan’s theories of groups bear on his personal life, Peters argues that regarding oneself or another party as wholly victim or wholly righteous is dangerous. He cites Edward Shapiro’s maxim to ask how the patient is right and applies it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, maintaining that the question keeps the other party human.

Austen Riggs Center, case conferences, clinical work, Erikson Institute, festschrift, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychotherapy, Senior Erikson Scholar, Vamık Volkan

This festschrift article is an appreciation of the psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan, written from the author’s experience of Volkan’s years as Senior Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, where he has taught, consulted, and attended case conferences since 2003. The author recounts that Volkan’s comments at these conferences typically begin by asking what is being treated. The author discusses how this question, set beside the Riggs staff’s habit of asking whom is being treated, directs attention to the patient’s developmental circumstances, primitive anxieties, defenses, and feared regression. The author reports Volkan’s view that the answer often lies in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and describes his concepts of deposited representations and linking objects, along with his brief technical advice to clinicians. The author also describes Volkan’s international work, including his autobiographical volume Enemies on the Couch and the International Dialogue Initiative, which has met twice yearly since Ankara in December 2007. The article lists the group’s aims: developing psychological concepts, building a shared language with diplomats and politicians, and supporting members who consult to governments. Turkish–Kurdish discussions and work in Northern Ireland are given as examples. The author is admiring of Volkan and concludes that his legacy will endure through his books and the colleagues who continue the work.

conflict resolution, emotional development, festschrift, Gerard Fromm, Lord John Alderdice, politics, psychohistory, reconciliation, societal settings, Vamık Volkan, violence

In this festschrift article, placed in the section on Volkan’s method, the author recounts a two-day meeting between about twenty politicians and community leaders in a country where renewed violence seemed possible. The meeting was arranged by Lord John Alderdice and led by Vamık Volkan, M. Gerard Fromm, and the author, with Ford Rowan organizing observers, all as members of the International Dialogue Initiative team. The author reports that the participants would not have attended without the expectation that a world-known authority would take part, and describes watching Volkan at work as co-leader. While the other co-leaders managed the group process, the author observes, Volkan concentrated on his leadership role. He began by asking participants to accept his authority to stop their tendency to speak in monologues, and on the second day he suggested that they share their unfinished mourning, which met resistance. The author interprets these moves as addressed to the group as a whole and as modeling for the leaders a way of engaging opposition. The author closes with a personal reverie likening Volkan to Atatürk as a leader who united differences, describes him as a Young Turk, and expresses admiration for working with him.

conflict resolution, cultural differences, festschrift, hospitality, national culture, post-Soviet era, psychohistory, Republic of Georgia, Tbilisi, Vamık Volkan

This festschrift article, a tribute to Vamık Volkan in the section on his method, draws on the author’s training and work with him at the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, University of Virginia School of Medicine. It recalls team projects in Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, Kuwait, the Republic of Georgia, and South Ossetia. Beginning with a description of Tbilisi, the author characterizes hope in a society marked by Soviet rule and ethnic conflict as constrained by unconscious conflicts rooted in history, and credits Volkan with an applied analytic understanding of political group conflict. The author identifies three features of his approach: a grounding in psychoanalysis and the view that mental life is largely unconscious and shaped by personal and cultural history; openness to historians, political scientists, and diplomats; and, as the most important, readiness to engage directly, both physically, as in staying with host families, and through deep interpersonal connection. The author recounts Volkan’s in-depth interviews with internally displaced people in Georgia and his work on chosen traumas and chosen glories. The author also recounts a 1993 project in Kuwait, where Volkan developed the team’s interview formulations into the basis of a report to the Kuwaiti government. The author is admiring of Volkan, refers readers to his writings, including the memoir Enemies on the Couch, and hopes others will adopt his model to bring unconscious barriers to durable peace to light.

Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI), Cold War, cultural-political differences, diplomacy, festschrift, intellectual forums, Mikhail Gorbachev, openness (glasnost), post-Soviet era, psychohistory, reform (perestroika), Soviet-American relations, stereotypes, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, the author, a former faculty member of the Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recounts work with Vamık D. Volkan and the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI). The account begins with the CSMHI delegation’s April 1990 visit to Moscow to study glasnost, perestroika, and Soviet-American relations. It then covers Volkan’s November 1991 workshop on ethnicity for representatives of Soviet republics and autonomous regions, at which the author helped interpret. The author wishes such forums had begun earlier and contends that mistakes and delayed decisions by Soviet leaders contributed to ethno-political conflicts. The article reports on CSMHI’s unofficial dialogues in Estonia from 1992 among Estonians, Russians resident there, and Russian representatives. These addressed Estonian feelings of shame and humiliation and Russian feelings of lost status. It also reports on the Georgian-South Ossetian work from 1995, undertaken with the Carter Center and the Foundation for the Development of Human Resources. That work included psychosocial rehabilitation of internally displaced persons and traumatized children. The author includes a personal anecdote from a Tbilisi trip. The author is admiring of Volkan, credits his approach with enabling participants to speak candidly, and recommends that diplomats and conflict-resolution professionals study his concepts and methods, citing John Kerry’s 2013 remarks at the University of Virginia on troops and diplomats.

Baltic States, Carter Center, Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI), conflict resolution, dialogue workshop, ethnic Russians, Estonians, festschrift, Kettering Foundation, psychohistory, Russian conflict, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, the author, formerly Senior Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution Program at The Carter Center, recounts working with Vamık Volkan from the early 1990s. The account centers on the 1995 Tallinn dialogue workshops, a three-year project run jointly by Volkan’s Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, The Kettering Foundation, and The Carter Center to prevent tensions among ethnic Russians in Estonia, Estonians, and Russians from escalating. Writing from memory of those workshops and of a conflict assessment in Albania, the author describes three occasions on which Volkan intervened. He asked an Estonian participant whether he wanted the Russians exterminated, and the question was met with silence. He described a bomb on a plane to address two Russian students’ wish to stay in the United States and the reactions of their Estonian peers. And he questioned a man in Albania about his family after Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship. The author characterizes the workshops as dialogues rather than clinical sessions. The author attributes to Volkan an ability to sense participants’ unseen psychological wounds and to use metaphor to prompt franker conversation. The author is admiring of him, likens his listening to the use of a stethoscope, and credits him with twenty years of informal mentoring.

conceptual formulation, diplomacy, festschrift, political psychology, psychohistory, psychology, psychopolitical tools, Realpolitik, subconscious, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, four authors writing from the Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust (PAKH), a German association founded in 1995, pay tribute to the psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan, who served the group as supervisor, consultant, mentor, and honorary member. The authors contend that earlier psychoanalytic writing on diplomacy and political violence was mostly theoretical, and credit Volkan with developing concepts that apply individual and large-group psychology to diplomacy and to peace negotiations. They report that his concepts of large-group identity and chosen trauma guided PAKH’s efforts to open dialogue between descendants of Holocaust survivors and of perpetrators, including the 1998 symposium “The End of Speechlessness?” and his book The Third Reich in the Unconscious. They also describe his unofficial diplomacy over four decades among groups including Arabs and Israelis, Serbs and Croatians, Turks and Greeks, and Turks and Armenians, and his work with Lord John Alderdice after September 11, 2001. They further recount his founding of the International Dialogue Initiative with Alderdice and Robi Friedman in 2007, and his tree model for psychopolitical dialogue. The authors are admiring throughout. They conclude that he has devoted his life to peace and dialogue, and note his several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

conflict prevention, conflict resolution, festschrift, large-group conflicts, Middle East, peace studies, political psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, an Israeli psychoanalyst offers an appreciation of Vamık Volkan’s work on large-group conflict and its resolution, focusing on its bearing on the Middle East. The author recounts first meeting Volkan at a conference in Düsseldorf on the impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their offspring, where he was invited to address tension between Jewish and non-Jewish organizers, and credits his handling of it with turning animosity into cooperative dialogue. The article reports that Volkan turned to large-group conflict after Anwar Sadat’s 1977 address to the Knesset, took part from 1980 to 1986 in Arab-Israeli dialogues sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association, and served in 2000 as Inaugural Rabin Fellow at the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. It outlines his methods of unofficial diplomacy: psychopolitical assessment of a conflict, psychopolitical dialogues among high-level representatives, and application of what was learned to institutionalized peaceful coexistence. The author summarizes Volkan’s proposals that personal and national identity are intertwined, that enemies as well as friends are central to human development and identity, and that ethnic pride can become violence against others. The author is admiring throughout and hopes that people working on political solutions in the Middle East will read his books.

dynamic relationships, festschrift, group dynamics, mentorship, political psychology, psychoanalytic literature, psychohistory, research assistant, Turkey, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, written for the Vamık Volkan festschrift section on peacemaking and hot spots, the author recounts his professional relationship with Volkan and the emergence of political psychology in Turkey. He describes meeting Volkan in 1974 while completing his residency at Ankara University and working under his supervision at the University of Virginia Medical School from 1980, where he first encountered political psychology. He connects his interest in leaders, followers, and large-group dynamics to Turkey’s political polarization, street clashes between right- and left-wing groups, and the 1980 military coup. He reports that Volkan’s note accompanying The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography, co-written with Norman Itzkowitz, made clear that discussing Atatürk as an ordinary human being was still inappropriate, and he concludes that examining the mystification of Ottoman and republican figures and symbols could help reconcile conflicting cultural identities. He then recounts founding a Center for Political Psychology under the Prime Ministry in 1992 after meeting with Süleyman Demirel and Ekrem Ceyhun, its later closure, and the establishment of the Turkish Psychopolitical Association in 2006. He also mentions Volkan’s 2006 visit to Ankara University, his own 2007 Turkish-language book Political Psychology, his teaching at state institutions, and the 2011 founding of Ankara University’s Center for the Study and Research of Political Psychology. He credits Volkan’s work and personal guidance with influencing the field in Turkey.

Anders Behring Breivik, conflict resolution, festschrift, grief, mourning, national tragedy, Norwegian terror attack, psychohistory, psychology of terrorism, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article for Vamık Volkan, the author applies Volkan’s theory of large-group identity to Norway’s experience of the July 22, 2011 bombing in Oslo and the shootings on Utøya, in which 77 people were killed. The author opens with Volkan’s message of condolence and recounts Norway’s initial suspicion of an outside attacker. The author describes the discovery that the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, was Norwegian as a narcissistic blow that turned the national response toward self-scrutiny. The author reads Breivik’s manifesto and his trial as exposing a separate large-group identity, sustained in right-wing online communities, and is sharply critical of its ideology. The author draws on published reports of Breivik’s upbringing to propose a link between his early experience and that ideology. Citing Volkan’s characteristics of large-group regression, the author argues that the society the manifesto envisions would push a threatened group toward greater violence. The author maintains that Norway’s leaders, especially the prime minister, supported mourning rituals and self-scrutiny rather than projection and revenge. The author concludes that helping people mourn will take many years and that Volkan’s work remains a resource for future atrocities.

collective psyche, democratization, festschrift, freedom of speech, Great War, intercultural dialogue, international conflicts, minority rights, Ottoman Empire, political participation, psychohistory, traumatic loss, Turkish Republic, unresolved mourning, Vamık Volkan

This article, contributed to the festschrift for Vamık Volkan, applies Volkan’s concepts of chosen trauma and unresolved mourning to the Turkish Republic’s relationship to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on the history of the Great War’s Eastern front, the Treaty of Sèvres, the War of Liberation/Independence, and recent political and media discourse, the author argues that Sèvres is Turkey’s chosen trauma. The author calls its effect on large-group identity the Sèvres Syndrome. The author contends that grief was met with silence rather than transmitted directly, while anxiety passed to younger generations. In the author’s account, this anxiety resurfaces in narratives of foreign and domestic plots to dismember the country, invoked in response to European Union accession, the 2009 Armenian Opening, and proposed openings to Kurds and Alawites. The author maintains that the Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002, challenged this outlook while promoting an Ottoman narrative, described as a glorification of the past, or Ottomania, that reactivated mourning. The author reports that recent protests were framed by the government as a foreign plot. Following Volkan and Itzkowitz, the author proposes that Turks have struggled to find an identity between the Ottoman and the Republican. The author concludes that proper mourning of past losses could ease historical anxieties and lessen nostalgia.

emotional development, festschrift, immigration, mourning, personal experience, psychohistory, reality constancy, separation-individuation, symbolization, transitional objects, Vamık Volkan, wish fulfillment

This article, part of the festschrift honoring Vamık Volkan, examines nostalgia and mourning in the immigrant experience. The author applies Volkan’s concept of linking objects, usually inanimate things psychologically contaminated with aspects of both the lost person and the mourner, together with his account of nostalgia as a linking phenomenon. Brief vignettes of immigrants, drawn from clinical and personal material, illustrate the argument. The author contends that leaving home means abandoning objects and places that sustain subjective continuity, and that symbols and transitional objects ordinarily bridge past and future, a function that trauma, including exile, can break. Nostalgia is characterized as a bittersweet mix of joy and sadness attached to idealized places that may be real, mythic, or imagined, and that disappoint on return. The author maintains that clinging to nostalgic memory impedes renunciation and so mourning, leading to depreciation of present life and inhibition in many areas of existence. Following Volkan and Akhtar, the author also proposes that a measure of nostalgia is normal and may give immigrants time to adapt and reach a more integrated sense of self. The article concludes that nostalgia is a return to something never possessed, a fantasy that, if entrenched, denies loss and blocks development.

conflict resolution, ethical issues, festschrift, forgiveness, historical injustice, ideology, large-group conflicts, mourning, psychohistory, psychopolitical strategies, reconciliation, religious issues, Vamık Volkan

This article, contributed to a festschrift for Vamık Volkan, surveys his psychoanalytic concepts on large-group conflict, apology, forgiveness, and mourning, and applies them to a case from Estonia. The author outlines Volkan’s account of core individual and core large-group identity from The Need to Have Enemies and Allies, the accordion phenomenon in peacemaking dialogues from Bloodlines, and collective mourning and linking objects from Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena. The author reports Volkan’s view that traumatized large groups must work through shame, humiliation, and guilt, and that perpetrator groups must also accept responsibility and mourn, before forgiveness can be offered or accepted. The author then applies these concepts to the 2007 removal of the World War II Soviet soldier statue from central Tallinn. The article characterizes the statue as a chosen trauma for Estonians and a chosen glory for Russians, and contends that both sides were unable to mourn their losses, showing collective regression, splitting into stereotypes, and unexamined humiliation. The article argues that psychodynamic understanding of projections can start a process of societal healing toward shared conceptions of truth, justice, and responsibility. It concludes that Volkan extends conflict reconciliation from individual to international peacemaking, and judges his work a contribution to applied psychohistory and political psychology.

conflict resolution, festschrift, international conflict, large-group psychodynamics, legacy, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, social conditions, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article honoring Vamık Volkan, the author returns to the question of what psychoanalysis is, prompted by Volkan’s work on large-group psychodynamics and its application to understanding and resolving international conflict. The article contends that psychoanalysis is above all an understanding of human motivation and behavior, conscious and unconscious. It disputes the position of some analysts that concepts derived from individual analysis cannot be applied to groups, a view the author describes as shared with Volkan. It proposes that psychoanalysis has three domains: a body of knowledge; clinical theory and technique arising from that knowledge and from treatment; and the application of that knowledge to social issues. The author traces this last domain from Freud through work on the arts, literature, history, group conflict, war, prejudice, bullying, immigration, and prevention. Drawing on personal clinical practice, the author outlines an approach with adults and children built on the analysis of transference, countertransference, and defenses, and on reconstruction of the patient’s past. With children, the aim is to help them understand their feelings, family conflicts, and development. The author recalls a senior colleague questioning an early paper on applying psychoanalysis to society, and maintains that applied psychoanalysis has been treated as a lesser “stepchild” of clinical work. The article is admiring of Volkan’s efforts to bring psychological understanding to the generation and resolution of conflict. It concludes that applied psychoanalysis deserves equal status within the field and credits Volkan with advancing that end.

academic medicine, biological psychiatrists, collaboration, festschrift, higher education, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic scholars, psychohistory, Vamık Volkan

In this festschrift article, the author offers an appreciation of Vamık Volkan based on decades of collaboration. The author recounts arriving at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in October 1980 with a letter of introduction from Anna Freud. This was a period when psychoanalytic scholars were leaving American psychiatry departments and biological psychiatrists were replacing them. Volkan, who had been about to accept a departmental chair at the University of Wisconsin, remained at Virginia, and the two founded the Division of Psychoanalysis, later the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction. The article describes their joint teaching of psychiatry residents, a six-month series of weekly sessions in 1982 teaching psychoanalytic thought to State Department diplomats, and their travel to the Baltic region after the fall of the Soviet Union to facilitate a peaceful transition between Russia and Estonia. Borrowing Deleuze’s trope of the fold, the author proposes that Volkan’s clinical work, teaching, and conflict resolution fold into one another. The author locates his mediation between fractured communities in a middle space between internal and external fields of reference, where historical events are replayed and conflicts can be made less toxic. The author concludes by expressing gratitude for Volkan’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Track II Diplomacy, and mental health.

ancient traumas, emotional inheritance, family dynamics, festschrift, legacy, poem, psychohistory, traumatic reliving, Vamık Volkan

apartheid, clemency, enlightened century, French Revolution, judicial reform, Maximilien Robespierre, psychohistory, retributive justice, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789-1790, revolutionary leadership, South Africa

In this article, the author compares the French Revolution and South Africa’s transition from apartheid, asking why the first produced punitive revolutionary justice and the second a Truth and Reconciliation Commission granting amnesty for truthful testimony. Applying trauma theory, including Judith Herman’s account of alternation between denial and intrusive repetition, to the Third Estate deputies of June and July 1789, the author draws on Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution and secondary historical accounts. The author argues that the deputies, unprepared for state violence from a king they had trusted, alternately denied and exaggerated the threat he posed, and that they and Louis XVI failed to grasp each other’s sensitivities, foreclosing accommodation. By contrast, the author contends that African National Congress negotiators, despite greater exposure to repression, were better equipped to negotiate, citing possible inoculation through repeated trauma, knowledge of revolutionary history, access to conflict resolution thinking, and attention to Afrikaner anxieties as reported by the journalist Allister Sparks. The author maintains that amnesty rested chiefly on the apartheid government’s retained coercive power rather than principle, contrasting it with a short-lived amnesty proclaimed in Paris in July 1789. Acknowledging that the account is partial, the author concludes that any fuller explanation would give Nelson Mandela a large role, and hopes for comparable figures elsewhere, naming the prisons of Israel.

alliance, armed conflict, bravery, diplomacy, military victory, organized society, psychohistory, survival

This article examines psychoanalytic efforts to understand combat and post-combat stress in response to World War I. It opens with the American soldier Audie Murphy as an example of the dual legacy of combat: heavily decorated, then troubled by insomnia and nightmares. It outlines trench warfare, British breakdown rates, and military attitudes toward psychological casualties. The evidence is the published work of four writers: Rivers’s Instincts and the Unconscious, Freud’s papers of 1915–1920, Jones’s contribution to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, and Kardiner’s The Traumatic Neuroses of War. The author reports that Rivers stressed social causes, repression, and catharsis, and attributes to him a conservative preference for social hierarchy. The author contends that Freud vacillated between external and internal causes, prioritized ego conflict and his sexual theory, and made an inaccurate claim that war neuroses vanished with the war’s end. Jones is described as emphasizing agency, conflict between conscience and released aggression, and individual differences in response. Kardiner is presented as treating trauma as an interaction between events and the adaptive resources of the whole person, identifying delayed symptoms, and revising instinct theory, though the author notes he omits the superego. The author concludes that Kardiner’s work proved most useful for later study of post-traumatic stress, and connects the topic to the effects of twenty-first-century wars on Americans.

mental health, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychohistory, suicide, U.S. military, U.S. veterans, veterans’ mental health, war trauma

This article, by two authors, addresses suicide among U.S. military veterans. It opens with press-reported figures that more veterans died by suicide than in combat in 2012. The authors sort returning veterans into five groups, ranging from resumed civilian life to suicide. They cite reports that Department of Defense statistics may undercount suicides, and they are sharply critical of military leadership, which they characterize as unwilling to link suicide to combat experience, naming remarks by Major General Dana Pittar. Their support consists of news accounts, published veteran testimony including Marine Timothy Kudo’s Washington Post essay on killing in Afghanistan, and research literature including studies by Shira Maguen and colleagues. They contend that war trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and exposure to or participation in atrocities and killing contribute to veteran suicide. They report that the cited studies associate killing in combat with PTSD symptoms and roughly doubled suicide risk. They propose that many affected soldiers suffer from what investigators call moral injury, and they regard PTSD as usually the bridge between combat and suicide, while acknowledging that suicide is multifactorial. They conclude that veteran suicide may result from a combination of PTSD, atrocity exposure, killing, a sense of betrayal by commanders, multiple deployments, medication effects, and childhood trauma. They close by suggesting that a line in a speech by President Obama on drone strikes may offer traumatized veterans a false solution.