You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Immortal Atatürk is the felicitous product of cross-disciplinary collaboration between eminent scholars, the psychoanalyst Volkan and the historian Iskowitz. Consistently interesting throughout, it is the result of seven years of extensive and intensive research into Turkish history and the effects of social structure—especially political—and socialization on the development of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and, in turn, his effect on Turkish customs and both intramural and international politics. The charismatic Atatürk became the "founder of the modern Republic of Turkey and one of the architects of the twentieth century" (p. 12). The research was enhanced by Volkan's fluency in Turkish, one result of his having been a Cypriot Turk. The Immortal Atatürk convincingly affirms Mack's (1978) opinion that psychoanalysis enables the biographer to "understand character, to provide psychological coherence to the pattern of life, to fathom motivation, and to understand how intrapsychic conflicts are transformed and surmounted in the subject's life" (p. 108). Volkan and Iskowitz's study