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Vamik Volkan is a unique, pioneering contributor to the psychoanalytic literature as well as to the field of large-group psychology. He is the author, coauthor or editor of more than fifty psychoanalytic and psychopolitical books. Some of his studies aim at describing the psychoanalytic process from beginning to termination. This volume similarly describes the course of a psychoanalytic treatment—in this case, from the perspective of the analyst’s supervisor.
In Ghosts in the Human Psyche: The Story of a “Muslim Armenian,” Volkan examines “the impact of past and present historical events, cultural elements, political movements, and their mental images on the psyche of individuals” (p. ix). As a psychoanalytic supervisor living in the United States, Volkan helps Dr. Ufuk, an analytic candidate from Turkey, treat Mert, a Muslim-Armenian man living in Turkey as a Turkish citizen, albeit with considerable unconscious ambivalence about his intrinsically polarized identity.
Mert is a 47-year-old successful businessman who struggles with sexual impotence, a fear of heights, and anxiety about entering the basement of his home. His childhood anxieties about ghosts and graveyards have persisted into adulthood. He grew up on an isolated farm on the eastern Black Sea coast, with uneducated parents who consciously and unconsciously denied their ethnic heritage. As a result, he did not become aware of his Armenian heritage until he began studying at the university. As a child, he slept in the same bed with his two older sisters, and he remembers being given sponge baths in the kitchen in front of them until the age of twelve due to the family’s limited resources.
Mert told his analyst that he felt anxious about not being “manly enough,” and the reader’s impression is that both his childhood and his adult years have been suffused with cultural expectations along traditional gender lines. Mert explained that he had been expected to be “strong” and “fearless,” while at the same time he