Beginning with Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysts have ventured beyond the couch to apply their knowledge of human behavior to large groups. For most of this century, however, the pervasive influence of Realpolitik in international relations coincided with a general skepticism as to whether psychoanalysis could offer anything to the resolution of political or interethnic conflicts. In a well-known exchange between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Freud stated that as a psychoanalyst he felt he should leave diplomacy to statesmen.
In 1977, an event occurred that would begin to change this kind of thinking. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made a visit to Israel and spoke before the Israeli parliament. In his speech, he suggested that 70 percent of the problems between Arabs and Israelis were psychological. This statement, backed by Sadat's international reputation and popularity in the United States, prompted a committee of the American Psychiatric Association to sponsor a project that brought together influential Egyptians, Israelis, and Palestinians for a series of unofficial dialogues between 1979 and 1986. The American facilitating team, which included Vamık Volkan, consisted of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, a psychologist, and two diplomats. The Israeli and Arab groups also included psychiatrists and psychoanalysts but were mostly composed of influential citizens — ambassadors, a former high-level military officer, the Mayor of Bethlehem, journalists, and others — attending the meetings in an unofficial capacity.
Soon after this project came to an end, Volkan founded the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at the University of Virginia. The nucleus of the center's faculty was drawn from the facilitating team of the Arab-Israeli dialogues. Since its founding in 1988, CSMHI has conducted research and projects in such locations as the Soviet Union, the Baltic Republics, Georgia, Kuwait, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Croatia, and has facilitated talks between representatives of enemy groups.
CSMHI is an interdisciplinary unit whose primary aim is to open windows between psychoanalysis, international relations, and history. The center applies a growing field-proven base of knowledge to such issues as ethnic conflict, racism, terrorism, large-group identity, societal trauma, and leader-follower relationships. Because no single discipline can fully illuminate such complex issues, CSMHI's faculty and board include not only psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists but also experts in diplomacy, political science, and history. Their combined perspectives and experience provide in-depth analysis of political, historical, and social issues and of the conscious and unconscious psychological processes intertwined with them. CSMHI also applies its insights to practical projects in the U.S. and around the world.
CSMHI has just completed its longest-running project, a five-year initiative in Estonia. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Estonia regained its independence in 1991, the country found itself facing many problems. It had border disputes with Russia, and Russian (Soviet) military personnel remained on Estonian soil. Hundreds of Soviet military bases, including a nuclear-powered submarine base, dotted the landscape, and the environment was badly polluted Most important, one-third of Estonia's 1.5 million population were Russians or Russian speakers, all of whom were now perceived by Estonians as former oppressors. As this new democratic nation developed, Estonians had to find new ways to relate to their neighbors in Russia as well as to Russian speakers living in Estonia.
Beginning in 1993, CSMHI applied its methodology—the “Tree Model” — to Estonia. The first step of the process, a psychopolitical diagnosis of existing conditions, becomes the roots of the tree. One aspect of this diagnosis involves conducting psychoanalytic interviews with a wide variety of individuals to discover the common themes in shared perceptions and anxieties. This has proven effective for identifying unconscious societal processes.
The tree's trunk consists of a series of unofficial multi-day meetings conducted by CSMHI faculty convening representatives from opposing large groups. In Estonia, this took the form of dialogues facilitated in collaboration with the Carter Center in Atlanta. Participants included ambassadors, Estonian and Russian legislators and officials, leaders from the Russian-speaking community in Estonia, scholars, and others.
During these meetings, psychoanalytic understanding of both small- and large-group dynamics was crucial. Facilitators created a background of safety and helped to remove participants' resistance to change. When this was accomplished, more realistic discussions could follow. Such discussions led to designing concrete projects at the community level (branches of the tree), which could serve as models for peaceful coexistence between Estonians and Russian speakers in Estonia.
In Estonia, CSMHI helped to build three such models, which have now been recognized by the Estonian government and are continuing on their own. Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Allan King captured the process of interethnic community building in a moving documentary about one of the model projects. Its title, The Dragon's Egg, refers to the Estonians' perception at the time of independence that the Russian population in their midst was like a dragon's egg laid in their nest. They feared what would hatch from it.
Existing psychoanalytic theories about large groups usually describe how an individual relates to his or her own large group, unconsciously and consciously. For example, the group and its political leader may represent images of father, mother, or idealized self, and the enemy group may be perceived as a sibling. This way of theorizing has led to certain “generic” understandings of large-group psychology. On a practical level, however, it does not offer much to political scientists or diplomats who deal with specific ethnic, national, or religious groups and their particular issues and problems. If we determine, for example, that a Romanian experiences his large group as a nurturing mother, and that a Hungarian has a similar image of his own group, we have not shed much light on the tensions between Romanians and Hungarians living in Transylvania, a region of Romania. Unless we articulate the mental representations of each group's history and how they affect the rituals enacted between the two groups, we cannot contribute to reducing tensions.
CSMHI studies large-group identity using concepts such as “chosen trauma” to describe each large group's identity as specific and unique. Chosen trauma refers to the shared mental representation of a past historical event during which a large group suffered losses and humiliation at the hands of an enemy group. Because of the enormity of the trauma, group
Joy Boissevain is program director of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction. J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., M.D., is CSMHI's Assistant Director.
members are left with psychological wounds that they pass down from one generation to the next. Subsequent generations are given tasks such as mourning losses and reversing humiliation. Since these tasks are shared by many members of the group, the mental representation of the original trauma becomes a marker of the groups identity.
During times of radical change in a large group's history, and amid the large-group regression that often characterizes such periods, political leaders tend to reactivate chosen traumas. After the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, for example, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic reactivated the Serbs' chosen trauma of the 1389 battle of Kosovo and their mental image of the fallen Serb leader Prince Lazar. In 1989, under the direction of Milosevic's government, Lazar's remains were put in a coffin and paraded on a year-long journey from one Serbian village to another. People came out to mourn this ancient loss as if it had happened yesterday (a phenomenon that CSMHI labels a “time collapse”). This not only increased the cohesiveness of the Serbian large-group identity, but also created an atmosphere for revenge against Muslim neighbors, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. These Muslims were perceived as the extension of Ottoman Turks who had been the Serbs' adversaries in the 1389 battle of Kosovo.
In addition to work regarding ethnic, national, and religious tensions and conflicts, CSMHI has also studied racism and immigration. Conferences on immigration and ethnic pluralism gathered in experts from psychoanalysis, anthropology, theology, and other fields. Facilitation of a meeting between white business executives and African-American community leaders in a major U.S. city deepened CSMHI's understanding of the practical dynamics of inner-city relations. CSMHI is poised to begin a series of dialogues combining theory and practice to address problems of violence and conflict in the inner city. The center has also examined the psychology of modern cults, apocalyptic leaders such as Jim Jones and David Koresh, and the relationships between cult leaders and their members. Issues of identity, ideology, and perceived threats are important in understanding the behavior of such groups.
In 1996, the U.S. Department of Justice formed a national commission to recommend ways to expand the FBI's resources for approaching incidents like those at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Chaired by Volkan and with CSMHI faculty member Gregory Saathoff participating, this group examined the role of behavioral sciences in the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
CSMHI is also expanding the concept of preventive medicine and its application to societies traumatized by ethnic and national conflict. Such conflict affects a society on many levels. The immediate psychological and medical needs of individuals must be met, but the large-group processes caused by the shared trauma, which need attention also, are often less obvious. At the invitation of the Kuwaiti government in 1993, the center fielded a team of psychiatrists and graduate students, led by former ambassador to Kuwait W. Nathaniel Howell, to study the residual effects of the Iraqi invasion and occupation. In the Republic of Georgia, CSMHI is now experimenting with ways to prevent the effects of trauma and lingering ethnic enmity from being passed to subsequent generations. After Georgia regained its independence in 1991, bloody ethnic conflicts erupted between Georgians, Abkhazians, and South Ossetians. Out of a population of 5.4 million, 300,000 people remain internally displaced. CSMHI is working in partnership with Georgian and South Ossetian psychologists and teachers to develop programs for children and refugees.
CSMHI disseminates its findings through publications, teaching, consulting, and the media. Its quarterly journal, Mind and Human Interaction, is distributed to scholars and policymakers from a wide range of disciplines in the U.S. and abroad. The journal opens communication between psychoanalysis and other disciplines with authors from some twenty countries and throughout the U.S. The most recent issue was devoted to the psychodynamics of leaders and decisionmaking.
For more information on the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, visit the centers Web site at .