Jerome Blackman interviewed Vamık Volkan on the occasion of the publication of The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, Vol. I: Concepts and Theories and Vol. II: The Tools of Unofficial Diplomacy, by Lexington Books. Dr. Volkan edited these books with Dr. Demetrios Julius and Joseph Montville; he is the author of another psychopolitical work, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships, published by Jason Aronson.
Jerome Blackman: Let me begin with a personal question. I believe you have begun to devote more of your professional time to developing an understanding of the psychology of large group (i.e., ethnic or national) processes rather than to the actual practice of clinical psychoanalysis. What led you to such a decision?
Vamık Volkan: I was born in Cyprus, which is home to different ethnic groups. Beginning in my teens the island became a hotbed of extreme nationalist feelings and interethnic violence. After I finished medical school at the University of Ankara, Turkey, I came to the United States. A few months later I learned that my roommate in Ankara, a medical student younger than I was, had been shot to death by terrorists while visiting his ailing mother in Cyprus. Soon after that, and for many years to come, my family and friends suffered a great deal. Looking back on it now, I would say that I felt a type of survivor guilt. I did not return to the island for twelve years, until a few months after my personal analysis was terminated. At this time in my life I was able to combine my emotional investment with my psychoanalytic intellectual curiosity, and I wrote a book, Cyprus—War and Adaptation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Ethnic Groups in Conflict. I began to form an understanding of large group conflicts in international relationships that was based on knowledge gained from treating regressed patients and individuals in mourning. But my “career” in political psychology might not have crystallized had President Anwar Sadat not visited Israel.
Blackman: What do you mean by that?
Volkan: When Sadat visited the Israeli Knesset in 1977, he stated that 70 percent of the Arab-Israeli problem was psychological. At that time I was a member of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs. Sadat's remarks set the stage for the APA to receive the necessary funds for a series of conferences attended by Egyptians, Israelis, and Americans between 1980 and 1985. As chairman in 1983, I presided over the committee's last three major conferences, in which Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza also participated. These meetings, attended by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists, as well as by influential citizens and diplomats (in an unofficial capacity), became laboratories for the study of the psychodynamics of interethnic and international' relationships.
Blackman: I understand you have experience with various groups in conflict. I assume that individual ethnic or international conflicts, because of their particular histories and circumstances, are different from each other in many ways. But surely there are elements common to all such conflicts, are there not?
Volkan: You are quite right. Ethnic and international conflicts should be studied case by case. In addition to the Arab-Israeli situation, I have been involved in many meetings concerning the political problems of Cypriot Turks and Cypriot Greeks, Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants, South Koreans, Filipinos and, most recently, the central Soviet government and the Republics. With the help of the Massey Foundation, Dean Robert Carey and I established the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia Medical School in 1988. Two years before the August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union took place and may of the Republics declared their independence, the center signed a five-year contract with the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences to collaborate on the study of ethnic and nationalistic processes in the Soviet Union. The drastic changes taking place there at present make these studies all the more important.
In working with our analysands we psychoanalysts always encounter oedipal conflicts. What makes our profession so interesting is that each analysand has his or her own way of dealing with this conflict. The same can be said of ethnic conflicts. Each group has its own way of dealing with the human drama. In the shadows, however, all humans share certain obligatory large group phenomena.
Blackman: Can you give some examples?
Volkan: In The Need to Have Enemies and Allies I wrote how, during childhood development and the adolescent passage, the sense of self is intertwined with ethnicity and nationalism, as well as with an increased need to hold on to such concepts whenever the large group is subjected to economic or military stresses or natural disaster. I drew attention to the fact that children belonging to a large group—i.e., an ethnic group—have shared targets that are supported and sponsored by the adults in that group for the purpose of receiving the projections of all the children in the group, especially at the peak of that period when they are finding a cohesive sense of self. The shared targets for projections—initially, inanimate cultural amplifiers—represent the beginnings of a shared “other” (enemies) and a shared “weness.” This leads to the concept of ethnicity, clan, or other large group labels. There are, of course, many other psychological events that foster the crystallization of the “us” and “them” dichotomy. My emphasis here is that because all of us make efforts to find a cohesive self and to form integrated representations of others as members of large groups, we need political enemies and allies to support these basic efforts.
Blackman: You mentioned that there are other psychological factors that pertain to the evolution of “us” and “them” divisions of large groups. Can you give another example?
Volkan: Obviously, various identifications are important, but let me speak of what I call the “chosen trauma.” This term refers to an even that causes a large group to feel helpless and victimized by another group, and thus share a narcissistic injury. A group does not really “choose” to be victimized, but it does “choose” to mythologize and dwell on the event. The group draws the mental representation of the event into its very identity. In addition to sponsoring shared inanimate and nonhuman suitable targets of projections for their children, the adults in the group direct the investments of the children into the group's “chosen trauma.” Once a trauma is “chosen,” the historical truth about it does not really matter. What is most important is its role in the group identity.
Chosen traumas are connected with the concept of a group's inability to mourn. In order for an event to be a group's chosen trauma, it should be an event that cannot be mourned adaptively. The inability to mourn also passes from generation to generation because the mental representations of chosen traumas (as well as chosen glories) are included in a group's identity, ethnicity and other large group concepts do not remain the same throughout their history. The inability to mourn a chosen trauma influences the group's social and political actions (e.g., whether to consider another group the enemy or to go to war) or its ideologies (e.g., whether to adopt a national policy of entitlement, say, or of purification).
Of course, ideologies do not come only from shared past or present group hurts; sometimes they evolve out of leaders' partly conscious, mostly unconscious, attempts to play out their intrapsychic dramas in the historical interethnic or international arenas. However, even in these circumstances, leaders usually ignite their followers' emotions by referring to chosen traumas and chosen glories.
Blackman: Large groups are not always at peace or always at war. What keeps the balance or tips the scales?
Volkan: Ethnic and national groups relate to each other in ritualistic fashion. These rituals originate with the psychology of neighbors. Today, due to technological advances, all groups are potential neighbors. But we still see the most fierce conflicts breaking out among neighbors who are in close physical proximity—e.g., Armenians and Azerbaijanis, or Tamils and Sinhalese. One ritual in particular deals with the issue of non-sameness. By emphasizing “non-sameness” with respect to another group, the first group maintains its cohesiveness. The leader-follower psychology, itself one of the most fascinating aspects of international relationships, aims to protect such rituals.
“A group does not really “choose” to be victimized, but it does “choose” to mythologize and dwell on the event.”
Blackman: One last question. Is the psychoanalytic perspective acceptable to people in the political world?
Volkan: Several years ago, my psychoanalyst colleague Dr. Maurice Apprey and I were invited to give a series of lectures on psychoanalysis to a select group at the State Department. Their response was basically that what we were talking about had no relation to their work. They were perfectly polite; they just did not see the connection. I think it is more effective to work with people who already are open to these issues, rather than knocking on strangers' doors. Most of the political and diplomatic participants in the psychopolitical activities I have been involved in are already aware of the importance of a psychological perspective—if they weren't, they wouldn't be there. Their role in communicating the significance of psychoanalytic ideas is incalculable. Some of my coworkers at the center are career diplomats, such as Harold Saunders (a former Assistant Secretary of State), Joseph Montville (a State Department veteran), and Richard Arndt (now president of the Fulbright Association). They—along with some Soviet colleagues, interestingly enough—having worked with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists, are passing on a new type of knowledge in their writings and communications with the diplomatic world.
It is interesting to note that under stressful conditions an ethnic group may regress and, once more, cause the utilization of shared inanimate and nonhuman objects that represent the group's cohesiveness and, in turn, the cohesiveness
of the individual's sense of self. For example, from early 1960 to 1968 Cypriot Turks were forced to reside in enclaves, and were surrounded by their enemies. Living as if they were prisoners, the Cypriot Turks raised thousands of caged parakeets, a bird not native to the island; the birds represented their imprisoned selves. At the same time, the Cypriot Turks took care of the birds, thus creating “good” images of rescuers (allies).
In the two volumes of The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, psychoanalysts such as John Mack, Rafael Moses, and Peter Olsson joined psychoanalytically influenced psychiatrists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, and diplomats to provide insights into the international relationships and the rituals involved. They show how such insights can be applied to help fashion the techniques of various types of so-called “unofficial diplomacy.”