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Vamik’s Room: a new vision of global diplomacy (movie)
Written, directed and produced by Molly Castelloe, 2019.
With M. Gerard Fromm, Vamik Volkan.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
(James Baldwin, 1985)
Vamik’s Room, an artistically rich and arresting documentary of the life and work of Vamik Volkan, opens with Volkan’s own observation, “History affects us whether we know it or not.” Molly Castelloe, writer and artist, spent seven years developing Vamik’s Room. The creative outcome is a pictorial narrative which outlines and celebrates Volkan’s seminal contributions to the understanding of the psychological and historical underpinnings of ethnic, racial, social and political conflict. His prescient formulations were developed over four decades of study and field work.
Vamik D. Volkan is emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School and an emeritus supervising analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a five time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (DCMHI, 1987–2002) at the Medical School of the University of Virginia. This center brought together interdisciplinary teams in conflict regions in the Middle East, the Soviet Union, the Baltic Republics, The Republic of Georgia, the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece and the United States. Volkan is the president emeritus of the International Dialogue Initiative, an organization of unofficial representatives from Israel, Germany, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the West Bank and the United States. This multidisciplinary group of professionals meets once or twice a year to examine leader–follower relationships in the context of large group identity using Volkan’s concepts as a frame for their study.
Vamik Volkan was born into grief on the British oc