Vamik Volkan: A Brief Introduction

Vamik Volkan was born in 1932 in a Turkish family on Cyprus, received his medical education in Turkey, and trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States. From a career in psychoanalysis in which he published many papers, he eventually found his way to creating a discipline in the application of psychoanalytic ideas to international conflict. Over the course of several decades, he has founded two institutions and a journal, met and often befriended world leaders, and, perhaps most importantly, developed a series of concepts that allow us to use psychoanalytic approaches to think about the large group processes that are so important in understanding conflicts among nations and groups.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Volkan for more than an hour recently, during which I received something of an introduction to his career and his thought. This is a brief summary of what I learned.

Dr. Volkan's distinguished career in mediating and understanding international disputes seems prefigured by — and perhaps can be seen as originating in — the fact that he was born on Cyprus, an island that has experienced ethnic tensions between its Turkish and Greek populations for centuries. It is striking that, being raised on a small island long wracked by conflict between two nationalities, after working in medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, Volkan made it his life's work helping world leaders understand the international tensions that they deal with and creating an intellectual discipline for understanding those tensions.

The sense of a man inexorably finding his way to his life's work is underlined by the fact that a series of external events and accidents played a large role in the beginning of his career. His interest in international relations had already won him a place on the Committee on Psychiatry and International Relations of the American Psychiatric Association, when Anwar Sadat stood the Middle East on its head in 1977 and, from the Israeli parliam