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Vamik's Room by Molly Castelloe, the winner of the 2016 Gradiva Award for Best Film and the Sidney Halpern Award in 2014, is a celebration of the life's work of Vamik Volkan, MD, a Turkish-Cypriot psychoanalyst who trained in the United States and who has lived and worked on the mid-Atlantic seaboard ever since. Crossing the boundaries of classical psychoanalysis into the transdisciplinary field of international relations, for which he helped to lay the foundations, Dr Volkan has applied psychoanalytical theories and concepts, such as those of the unconscious, projection, regression, splitting, dissociation and identity, to the study of social conflicts and inter-group relations. By creating a new vocabulary and virtually a new grammar for understanding the psychodynamics of persons and their groupings in war zones, refugee camps and other geographical areas in which people have suffered massive social trauma, Volkan has enabled us to better understand the effects of psychological factors on international relations, and vice versa. His devotion to this project is based on his early personal experience of the 20th century conflicts in his homeland, the island of Cyprus, especially the disputes between the Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot ethnic groups.
An Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia; a Senior Erikson Scholar at the Erik Erikson Institute of Education and Research at the Austen Riggs Center; and an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Vamik Volkan has received five nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. By the end of the Cold War, with remapped European borders, and the emergence of a post-colonial Africa, Volkan's work found new demands and new challenges, especially in those countries which had ‘belonged’ to the former Soviet Union, such as Albania, Estonia, Georgia, and South Ossetia.
As illustrated in Castelloe's most engaging film, one of his first initiatives, from 1979 to 1986, t