Making Vamik's Room

How did I come to make a film about Dr. Vamik Volkan? The project arose from my experiences being a woman of a particular family rooted in the southern United States. As D.W. Winnicott said, home is where we start from.

My family dispensed propaganda concerning the illusion of love. Our group of seven operated according to what Wilfred Bion called the “basic assumption of dependency.” Bion categorized small groups according to a handful of emotional dynamics, and this was one, written by him as “baD” (basic assumption Dependency). Dependency groups, he claimed, have a distorted relationship to time. Mine was no exception. My beloved kin speak with diphthong vowels as if sliding back in time through their double melodies of speech. Our small group was led in the most traditional way. We submitted to a beloved patriarch and to the biases of our geography. Our southern state lumbered under intergenerational guilt for African American slavery, and still does, while at the same time lamenting the loss of Confederate monuments.

There is a bronze confederate statue on the quad at the local college campus, UNC-Chapel Hill, commonly known as “Silent Sam.” This is ironic nomenclature considering the stories of shared trauma it holds. This young soldier, long the target of heated controversy, was pulled down by protestors last year. As it is said, time stood still in the south when Lee surrendered to Grant — a moment that crystalized its impotence and which we continually return to. Volkan calls this temporal regression “time collapse,” and his primary example is the Serbian loss of the Battle of Kosovo (1389), called up by Slobodan Milošević at a Kosovo rally in 1989. This is portrayed through a climactic scene in my film.

Time collapse is a sign of petrified grief or what Volkan describes as “complicated mourning.” Mourning is a major theme is his work. How does one get over loss? Studying his work, I realized how the south suffers from nostalgia. This condition in large groups