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The International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) is a small international organization that provides psychologically-informed dialogue for adversarial groups, often communities disturbed by war, immigration, or a change in a governing regime. Members of this initiative share a common interest in “global health diplomacy” and come from the disciplines of psychoanalysis, history, sociology, political science, law, economics and journalism (p. 109). The raison d'etre of their approach follows from the assumption that “the capacity to speak of feelings” is often overlooked in diplomatic negotiations and yet is crucial to conflict resolution because it is intense emotions, like fear, and the defenses against them that are at the root of inter and intra group discord (p. 64). The book elaborates a framework for recognizing, understanding and working with these dynamics towards conflict resolution and is structured in three main sections: Theory, Application, and Methodology.
A few main concepts provide the basis of this work beginning with large-group identity, which Vamik Volkan describes as an ethnic, national, political or religious group comprised of hundreds of millions of people who may not know each other, but share the same traditions and culture, and most importantly history. Large-group identity requires shared memories. With examples from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe the contributors demonstrate some of the ways this organizing identity, an unconscious emotional phenomenon, works.
While not always the case, a large-group's identity is often based on a “chosen trauma,” a collective injury such as defeat in war or loss of land, that becomes unconsciously “chosen” to represent the identity of the large group due to its being a shared loss insufficiently mourned (p. 11). The significance and purpose of individual mourning is an emergent theme from the start. “A chosen trauma… reflects the infection of a group's mourning process,” as M. Gerard Fromm writes in an ear