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The primary focus of the work of Vamik Volkan and of his latest book, Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace, in particular, is the psychodynamics of how large neighboring groups negotiate relations with each other. Within this primary focus he wants to know what makes ethnicity or nationality “hot.”
He wants us to consider in particular those human circumstances, like shared historical memories, that are so influential and so abiding that humans would rather die than flatten or change their ethnic identities. He wants us to consider why we need shared enemies and/or allies to define our ethnic identities, and to hang on to them at any cost. Volkan discusses forms of ethnic or national purification that ranges from flag waving to ethnic cleansing.
Think then what function “a group” defined by a firm ethnic identity can serve. Something happens in such a group that transforms emotional investment into a potent weapon at quantitative and qualitative levels. This emotional investment can be treated as power to drive sadistic or masochistic events. Broadly, Volkan writes about these powerful emotional forces as “shared reservoirs.” Under the rubric of “shared reservoirs,” we have a catalogue of intersubjective affinities, cultural prescriptions and constraints that include but are not limited to the following: the creation and crystallization of suitable targets for projection; adaptive and maladaptive functions of prejudice that come to define self and other; and, most significantly, what Volkan calls chosen trauma and chosen glory to signify an event that causes a group to unconsciously define itself by a historically significant and humiliating defeat or to lift its collective sense of well-being by the historical experience of victory.
The concept of chosen trauma is central to the understanding of Volkan's work. It is propelled by a group's inability to mourn its humiliating defeat. Having mentalized such a defeat, a group may now see