I thank Michael Slevin for asking me to contribute to this special section of TAP and describe my efforts to reach beyond the consulting room into international relations—conducting unofficial dialogues between enemy representatives, working at refugee camps, and examining why humans kill the Other in the name of their large-group identity.
In the psychoanalytic literature, the term “large group” sometimes refers to 30 to 150 individuals who meet in order to deal with a given issue. I use the term “large group” to refer to tens of thousands or millions of people, most of whom will never know or see each other, but who share a feeling of sameness, a large-group identity. A large-group identity is the end-result of myths and realities of common beginnings, historical continuities, geographical realities, and other shared linguistic, societal, religious, cultural, and political factors. In our daily lives we articulate such identities in terms of commonality, such as “we are Apaches; we are Lithuanian Jews, we are Kurdish; we are Slav; we are Sunni Muslims; we are Taliban brothers; we are communists; we are Northern Ireland Unionists.” Many descriptions of tribal, ethnic, national, or political large groups appear in the literature of history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. As psychoanalysts we should pay more attention to the psychodynamic processes that take place within a large group and within its relationships with other large groups, instead of preoccupying ourselves with surface terms defining large-group identity.
Born to Turkish parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, I came to the United States in 1957 as a newly graduated physician from the University of Ankara's Medical School in Turkey. Since then I have had three professions. Unlike my years-long preparation to become a psychoanalyst and a medical administrator, I was completely unprepared for my third profession of psychoanalytic “political psychologist.” I did not give myself this title and I seldom use it, but have accepted the fact that, for some decades now in many academic and political circles, I have become identified with this term. I was one of the founders of the International Society of Political Psychology and its fourth president in 1983-84.
Psychoanalytic training does not include politics and international relations. Nevertheless, starting with Sigmund Freud, a number of psychoanalysts have shown interest in large-group human behavior, political leader-follower relationships, political ideologies and religion. Especially after the Holocaust psychoanalysts also began to examine the influence of massive trauma at the hand of the Other and its transgenerational transmission.
My involvement in my third profession was accidental. In 1977, then Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat stunned the political world by visiting Israel. When he addressed the Israeli Knesset he spoke about a psychological wall between Arabs and Israelis and stated that psychological barriers constitute 70 percent of all problems existing between the two groups. With the blessings of the Egyptian, Israeli, and American governments, the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs followed up on Sadat's statements by bringing together influential Israelis, Egyptians, and later Palestinians for a series of unofficial negotiations that took place between 1979 and 1986. My membership in this committee initiated my third profession.
After that project ended, I founded the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) under the umbrella of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Through my years at CSMHI I headed its interdisciplinary team (including psychoanalysts, political scientists, former diplomats, and historians) that conducted multi-year unofficial diplomatic dialogues between Americans and Soviets, Russians and Estonians, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, Georgians and South Ossetians, Turks and Greeks and studied post-revolution or post-war societies such as Albania after dictator Enver Hodxa and Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. I also worked with traumatized people in refugee camps where “we-ness” becomes palpable.
I was honored to be a member of former President Jimmy Carter's International Negotiation Network for over 10 years starting in the late 1980s. I spent some time with other political or religious leaders, such as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the late Yasser Arafat, Estonian President Arnold Rüütel, Turkish President Abdullah Gül, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and observed aspects of leader-follower psychology up close.
Since my retirement from the University of Virginia in 2003, I have joined other psychoanalysts (Lord John Alderdice, Edward Shapiro, Gerard Fromm) and psychoanalytic group therapists in meeting with representatives from the Arab countries, Iran, Israel, Russia, Germany, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States every six months to examine world affairs from a psychopolitical point of view (see: ). In short, for over 30 years, I have been examining many psychological “walls” in numerous international contexts and putting my findings in theoretical and practical frames.
Generally speaking, psychoanalysts have been interested in what a large group means to an individual, but my unusual experiences have taught me that there is a need to expand psychoanalytic investigation of large
Vamık D. Volkan, M.D., is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, an emeritus training and supervising analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
groups and to consider large-group psychology in its own right. What does this mean? There are echoes of individual psychology in large-group psychology shared by tens of thousands or millions of persons, but large groups do not have one brain to think with or two eyes to cry. The multitudes of people in a large group share a psychological journey, such as complicated mourning after major shared losses at the hand of the Other, or when they use the same psychological mechanism such as “externalization,” making the Other a shared target. These journeys become sustained social, cultural, political, or ideological processes that are specific for the large group under study.
Considering large-group psychology in its own right means making formulations as to a large group's conscious and unconscious shared psychological experiences and motivations that initiate specific social, cultural, political, or ideological processes that influence this large group's internal and external affairs. This is the same process psychoanalysts follow in their clinical practice when they make formulations about the internal worlds of their patients in order to summarize what their diagnoses and treatments will be.
One example: Complications of shared mourning of the many members of a large group may create what I call entitlement ideologies. This refers to a shared sense of entitlement to recover what was lost in reality and fantasy during a collective trauma at the hand of the Other. Entitlement ideologies can also refer to the mythologized birth of a large group, a process that later generations idealize. Later generations deny the difficulties and losses that had occurred at the time, and imagine their large group as if it were composed of persons belonging to a superior species. Holding on to an entitlement ideology primarily reflects a complication in large-group mourning, an attempt both to deny losses as well as a wish to recover them, a narcissistic reorganization accompanied by “bad” prejudice toward the Other.
Each large group's entitlement ideology is specific. Some entitlement ideologies are specifically named in the literature: what Italians call “irredentism” (related to Italia Irredenta), what Greeks call “Megali Idea” (Great Idea), the Turks' “Pan-Turanism,” the Serbs' “Christoslavism,” and what extreme religious Islamists of today call “the return of an Islamic Empire.” The American entitlement ideology, usually called “American exceptionalism,” was inflamed after September 11, 2001. Such ideologies may last for centuries and may disappear and reappear when historical circumstances change.
Like an individual reactivating childhood traumas in his or her regression, during its disorganization following a current tragic event at the hand of the Other, members of a large group reactivate the shared mental representation of a specific ancestral trauma at the hand of the Other—what I call a “chosen trauma.” This exaggerates the large-group's entitlement ideology and may lead to new tragedies. For example, after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbian chosen trauma, the centuries-old shared mental representation of the Battle of Kosovo, was reactivated and was linked to Christoslavism. Reactivation creates a time collapse: when feelings, thoughts, and perceptions about ancestors' trauma become intertwined with feelings, thoughts, and perceptions of current issues, magnifying danger and even leading to genocidal acts.
There are echoes of individual psychology in large-group psychology shared by tens of thousands or millions of persons, but large groups do not have one brain to think with or two eyes to cry.
I began to think of the classical Freudian theory of large groups by visualizing people arranged around a gigantic maypole, which represents the group leader. Individuals in the large group dance around the pole/leader, identifying with each other and idealizing and supporting the leader. I have expanded this metaphor by imagining a canvas extending from the pole over tens of thousands or millions of people, forming a kind of gigantic tent. In this revised metaphor, the people still surround the pole/leader and support it—especially when there is a conflict with those living under another tent—determined to keep it upright, but their underlying concern is to keep the canvas taut so it can form a protective overarching cover. The cloth of the canvas of this metaphorical tent represents large-group identity and its border.
I have come to the conclusion that essential large-group activities center around maintaining the shared narcissistic investment in the large-group's identity and its integrity, but leader-follower interactions are only one element of this effort. Wars, warlike situations, terrorism, diplomatic efforts, shared losses and gains associated with shared mourning or elation are all carried out in the name of large-group identity, an abstract concept. This is true even though this psychological source is usually hidden behind rational real-world considerations, economic, legal, or political.
While individuals under the metaphorical gigantic tent wear their individualized garments (individual identities) and decorate them with symbols of social or political subgroups to which they belong—families, neighborhoods, gangs, professions, and political parties—in certain situations everyone under this tent also wears the canvas of the
tent as a shared second garment. In peaceful times people turn their attention toward their individualized garments and their daily interactions with family, relatives, clan, neighbors, schools, professional and social organizations, sports clubs, local and national political parties, and Facebook pages. But when a large group is humiliated or threatened by Others who identify with another large group, the attacked population to a great extent abandons its routine preoccupations and becomes obsessed with repairing, protecting, and maintaining the canvas of the tent. The attackers who humiliate, maim, and kill in the name of their large-group identity and who live under their own metaphorical tent also wear their tent canvas as a shared second garment. Minority dissidents on both sides remain ineffective in the interaction between the enemy groups.
Tens of thousands or millions of individuals sharing a metaphorical garment are analogous to individuals who are not constantly aware of their breathing; but if they find themselves in a smoke-filled room or develop pneumonia, they notice every breath they take. Similarly, when a large group is under stress and the large-group identity is injured or threatened or when a large-group kills in the name of identity, the people who belong to such large groups become keenly aware of their “we-ness” and quickly and definitively separate their large-group identity from the identity of the Other, the “enemy” large group. Under certain circumstances many individuals behave not according to their individualized personality organizations, but according to the influence of their large-group psychology. This is often just as true of those who come to negotiation tables and face enemy representatives as it is of ordinary people on the street. It is also true for terrorists.
As I write this brief paper my new book, “Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace,” is ready to be published. My hope is that it will interest psychoanalytic colleagues in finding ways to investigate world affairs further. The future of psychoanalysis, its value and influence, I am convinced, will be supported significantly if psychoanalysts contribute more to large-group psychology in its own right and their findings become crucial in understanding the new civilization that is being ushered in through modern globalization and incredible communication technology.
Editor's Note:
Volkan's new book Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace, can be pre-ordered at as this issue goes to press.