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Bloodlines is a riveting book for both the educated lay person interested in international affairs and political science, or the professional in the field. Vamik Volkan, in this new book, builds upon his earlier work, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies. He takes on the challenge of fathoming the complex reasons why one ethnic group terrorizes or attempts to exterminate the other. He writes with his characteristic depth and density of historical, political, and psychological material. Volkan's writing style is not encumbered by jargon, and is concise, scholarly, and spell-binding in its persuasive and authentic emotional impact on the reader.
Volkan discusses one of the fascinating ways he gathers data when he and his team conduct “unofficial diplomacy.” “One way of diagnosing the emotional state of large groups is by visiting Hot Spots with them, observing their behavior, and listening to their remarks” (p. 201). Hot Spots are locations such as national cemeteries, memorials, museums, or monuments. These places have become invested with strong group emotions because of past or current political, military, or historical conditions. Collecting this kind of data is, to large group psychology, what listening to a patient's dreams is to the psychoanalysis of an individual. A patient's dreams (and fantasies, free associations, and jokes) provide access to his unconscious, visiting Hot Spots serves a similar purpose in revealing what otherwise might remain hidden or unexpressed in an intergroup dialogue.
This lucid grasp of the collective emotions of large groups is one of Volkan's major contributions to political psychology. Volkan has a unique way of informing our understanding of the emotional core of a large group through the examination of perceptive comments by articulate individuals who reflect the unconscious currents of the group they care deeply about.
Volkan provides striking glimpses of the effectiveness of this approach in clarifying profound ethnic group tensio