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This is an intensely personal book full of first-person illustrative vignettes with the qualities of good autobiography. Volkan is a Turkish Cypriot, a son of Cyprus, who was born and received his childhood socialization and schooling through high school there. He is a founding member and sometime president of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). At the University of Virginia, where he is now Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, he founded the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction and its journal, Mind and Human Interaction. In 1999 he was the Sigmund Freud Visiting Scholar in Vienna.
Volkan is especially strong on the minor group differences in Cyprus, the psychological turf he knows most intimately. Cyprus, a Greco-Turkish island, lies at the Eastern Mediterranean intersection of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, as does Volkan's work. Its situation is the strategic reason Disraeli acquired the island for Britain in 1878. Volkan's observations are intimate, filled with childhood and family memories, ful1 of rich in-depth observations of symbolic practices like bird collecting: “The birds in cages represented the externalized self-representations, mental doubles, of the Cypriot Turks. As long as the birds produced new birds, sang and survived, the Cypriot Turks could hope for survival” (p. 145). He presents vignettes of how child-rearing practices (e.g., circumcision in latency) and family structure, including multiple mothering, influence perceptions of the world and of enemies. As Volkan poignantly observes, the cultural and social similarities, including dress, among Greek and Turkish Cypriots are much greater than the superficial differences that have been inflamed by projection, war, trauma, and hatred. He is gifted and understands his own subjectivity. Thus he writes: