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This book investigates how traumatic events of the social sphere such as war, exile, and political strife mentally embed themselves in individuals and communities across generations. This study of one entire case in Turkey, supervised by the author, focuses on the “intertwining of internal and external events” and is addressed to psychoanalytic practitioners, teachers, and supervisors working in foreign countries (Volkan, 2015, p. ix).
The opening chapter examines how analysts have resisted considering external socio-political and historical events with the equal weight given to personal and familial ones. A review of the field elucidates how in the early 20th century Freud's renunciation of the seduction hypothesis shifted emphasis away from external stimuli and onto infantile fantasies and oedipal configurations. Following the Second World War many clinicians left effects of the Holocaust unanalyzed in attempt to counteract their own personal feelings of helplessness when faced with this external threat to their livelihood. Controversy over recognizing how political turmoil bears on internal life marked the American Psychoanalytic Association into the 21st century and resistances to recognizing the impact of such events linger still. However, the reader will benefit from the long list of references here that address the intertwining of internal and external events.
Subsequent pages expand on therapeutic uses of transference and countertransference when hearing the patient's story, especially around issues of ethnic identity. “Mert,” an affluent businessman in his late 40s living in Istanbul, began analysis four times a week on the couch with an analytic candidate supervised by the author. The patient came to treatment troubled by a fear of ghost and graveyards, a phobia suffered since childhood, and complaining of sexual dysfunction with his wife: panic attacks during intercourse and, at times, loss of his erection and premature ejaculation.
Mert grew up in a rural v