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.
This book launches new perspectives from a psychoanalytic stance on engagement with the unconscious dynamics of Islamic culture and how it shapes emotional experience from an unconscious psychoanalytic perspective. Borrowing from David Armstrong's idea of “the organisation in the mind” we could think of this book as exploring “Islam in the mind” or even “Islam on the couch”, but from the highly specified and boundaried perspective of clinical psychoanalytic engagement of an Islamic Armenian with a Turkish psychoanalyst whose work has been recorded and commented upon by her supervisor. In Volkan's book it is not so much Islam that is being investigated but the experience of the cultural and political practices and warfare that divide societies rather than unite them across difference.
Volkan's Ghosts represents, as the subtitle suggests “The story of a ‘Muslim Armenian’”. It provides an account of an individual in psychoanalytic psychotherapy from the particular perspective of the supervisor of a psychoanalytic candidate in training in Turkey. The patient in question belongs to the Hemshin people from the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey near the Republic of Georgia and Armenia. In the 1970s this region, and the patient's adolescence, was torn apart by violent civil war between extreme right-wing and leftist movements fighting for power, ending around the time he left the farming community of his extended family and moving at the age of seventeen to Ankara to begin his university education and its secularising and aspiring Turkish-based cultural future. Eventually he became a successful businessman, an identity he always struggled to live up to with profound feelings of humiliation about his original identity. Despite his parents identifying as Turks his Armenian Hemshin language and the legitimation of cruel and violent practices in the raising of men positioned him as an outsider sensitive to the inferiority of the Hemshin people who had been Islamicise