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“History affects us whether we know it or not.” So begins Molly Castelloe's timely film Vamik's Room, a documentary about the life and work of Vamik D. Volkan, M.D.1 Linking different moments of Volkan's personal history to his clinical work and social activism, Castelloe introduces us to Volkan's Turkish Cypriot roots, his early training as a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, and his pioneering use of clinical psychoanalytic concepts in attempting to understand social conflicts and international relations.
Civil unrest and war on the island of Cyprus became a catalyst for Volkan's lifelong attempt to understand and treat political maladies that seem to be symptomatic of the nation-state. The documentary walks the viewer through many of its subject's central theoretical ideas and ethnographic observations, which are certainly worthy of engaging and reexamining during this period of global unrest, regression toward ahistorical pseudo-nativism, and a frightening trend in which authoritarian forms of governance are making gains in countries around the globe. Volkan's observations on these topics suggest a common political disorder with varied symptomatic manifestations depending on the cultures, religions, languages, and histories of the polities involved.
The propensity for intergroup violence, Volkan begins by saying, has everything to do with “large group identity” and the need to protect it. He goes on to explain that killing in the name of identity is contingent on one group of humans seeing another group of humans as a pseudo-species, and that it is impossible to make peace between warring factions unless one understands the psychodynamics of large groups and what they are