Vamik Volkan Discussing His New Book
I sent Dr Volkan some questions about his book. Here are his thoughts:
AD: Tell us a bit about your background
VV: I was born in 1932 to Turkish Cypriot parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus when it was a British Colony. The first humans on the island arrived about ten thousand years before the birth of Christ. As the centuries went by, invaders and traders multiplied. In my childhood I was exposed to people with different large-group identities: Cypriot Greeks, Cypriot Turks and, in much smaller numbers, Armenians, Maronites, people who considered themselves as descendants of Phoenicians and, of course, the British – all living side by side. Only much later I begin to wonder what history means for people with different large-group identities.
In early 1957 I came to the United States armed with my medical degree from the Ankara University’s Medical School in Turkey and only 15 dollars in my pocket, but I had a job at a hospital in Chicago. I became an American citizen a few years later. My departure to the United States was part of the phenomenon known as the ‘brain drain.’ The United States lacked medical doctors at this time and therefore attracted doctors from around the world. I had my psychiatric and psychoanalytic training in the USA.
In 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited the Knesset and famously referred to a psychological “wall” between the Israelis and the Arabs—a wall that, he stated, accounted for 70 percent of the problems between them. In response, the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, of which I was a member, brought influential Arabs and Israelis together for unofficial dialogues for six years to find out if this “wall” could be made permeable. This is how I started my decades-long work in unofficial diplomacy.
I met and had opportunity to spend time with many political and community leaders (For example, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, the Emir family in Kuwait, North Cyprus President Raif Denktaş, Turkish President Abdullah Gül, Estonia President Arnold Rüütel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu). This also helped me to study leaders-followers interactions and national, ethnic, religious and political large-groups’ psychology. As an academician, generally speaking, I stayed away from the news media. However, I believe that deeper knowledge about what lies behind what we see, hear and learn daily is useful for the public
AD: What led to the writing of Large Group Psychology: Racism, Societal Division, Narcissistic Leaders, and Who We are Now?
VV: I have been living in Charlottesville, Virginia since 1964. Following the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in my city numerous fatal attacks on churches, synagogue and mosques occurred worldwide. In many countries, people are asking the metaphorical question “Who are we now?” and coming up with seemingly opposite answers. I could no longer ignore the urge to write a new book about large-group problems.
During my decades-long activities in the international arena I have learned that behind observable factors like politics, economics and law, the central psychological factor in starting and keeping alive large-group conflicts is the protection and maintenance of large-group identity. During my work I heard the subjective experiences of such large-group identities being expressed in terms such as “We are Palestinians,” “We are Lithuanian Jews,” “We are Russians living in Estonia,” “We are Polish,” “We are Communists,” “We are Sunni Muslims.”
AD: I visited Cyprus in October 1993 for an international ecumenical conference in Limassol devoted, in part, to overcoming division and conflict between Christians. As a young, naive kid from Canada I was almost entirely ignorant of the conflict until we were given a guided tour of Nicosia, getting as close to the DMZ/Buffer Zone as we were allowed. I've never forgotten the shock of seeing that, like a huge open scar right across the city streets. That division and its conflict are very personal for you, as you tell us in your moving first chapter. Is that conflict part of your own working through of the "rescue fantasy" (p.1) you speak of as motivating some therapists and clinicians?
VV: My arrival in America in 1957 coincided with the Cypriot Greeks’ struggle against British rule in order to unite Cyprus with Greece. The Greek Cypriots began to oppress Turkish Cypriots and an ethnic conflict was inflamed. I experienced a terrible stabbing pain six months after taking up residence in America. My father sent me a newspaper clipping with very grave tidings. My roommate, Erol, from the days when we lived in clapped-out lodgings in Turkey while attending the same medical school had returned to Cyprus to tend to his ailing mother. He was the nearest thing to a brother that I have had. A Greek terrorist shot him seven times, killing him, in a pharmacy where he was buying medication for his mother.
He was murdered in order to terrorize the ethnic group to which he belonged. After receiving the news of his death, I felt numb. I did not cry. I was in Chicago, in a foreign environment in which I was close to no one, so I did not share the news of my former roommate’s murder with any other person. Much later I would become aware how the murder of my roommate played a role in my involvement for finding ways for a more peaceful world.
Relationship between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks changed greatly since your visit to the island in 1993. Border crossing points are now available. Due to COVID-19 there are the necessary cautions for border crossings.
AD: Your discussion of group psychology is, as of course you note at the outset, indebted to Freud and his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
One of the key points you repeat in your book is that group psychology exists "in its own right." Tell us a bit more what you mean by that and why it's important to be clear about this.
VV: Sigmund Freud and his followers (in the clinical setting) described what belonging to a large ethnic, national or religious group means for an individual and how an individual unconsciously perceives his or her large group as a symbol of a mother or father figure.
My work is very different. As a psychoanalyst I have studied the shared psychological processes within a large group and relationships between opposing large groups. Large-group psychology in its own right means making formulations about the conscious and unconscious shared past and present historical/psychological experiences that exist within a large group. Making such formulations enlarges our understanding of the emergence of present-day societal-political-religious events, and leader-follower relationships.
Doing this allows us to look at the interactions between opposing large groups in depth. This is similar to a psychoanalyst making formulations about his or her analysands’ developmental histories associated with various conscious and unconscious fantasies in order to understand what motivates certain behavior patterns, symptoms and habitual interpersonal relationships.
AD: Two other key phrases recur in your book, reflecting some of your earlier work: "Complicated mourning" and "survivor guilt." From everything I'm hearing in this pandemic, there seems to be a lot of both being experienced by people today. Tell us a bit about those and how you understand them.
VV: I wrote about my roommate Erol’s murder above. Since I did not have family members or friends in Chicago at that time, I had no one to share my feelings and thoughts about my loss. My mourning process was complicated.
Also, I was not aware of my “survivor guilt.” While I was safe in the US my family members in Cyprus were living under very difficult conditions and my former roommate was dead. Decades later I realized how I handled my “complicated mourning” and “survival guilt.” My first academic research was on these topics. I wrote papers and books on these subjects. My book (with Elizabeth Zinti), Life After Loss has been translated into several languages.
In the present book, the reactions to loss are seen in the Addendum, which describes 16 analysands’ initial responses to the pandemic. These patients returned, consciously and unconsciously, to their childhood losses and re-experienced anxieties and old defense mechanisms and fantasies linked to such losses. Moreover, when I gave a seminar for 8,000 Chinese mental health workers on trauma due to COVID-19 pandemic on April 3, 2020 I encouraged them to study the psychology of mourning.
AD: You note (p.29) that an individual who has difficulty in mourning can often pass that on to succeeding generations, resulting in the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Is that also a dynamic we see at work in groups, indeed whole countries? Could it be said that some of the rage and grief today over police brutality and racism are at least partly due to America's never really having grieved the legacy of slavery and attempted to heal from it?
There are variations of transgenerational transmissions and all of them depend on the permeability of the psychological boundary between children and their mothers or other important caretakers. It is not only anxiety that travels from the mother or other primary caretaker to a developing child through the permeable boundary. Other psychological “messages” are also given to the child.
Important adult persons may push their specific self- and object-images into the developing self-representation of the child. In other words, the “other” uses the child, mostly unconsciously, as a reservoir for certain self- and object-images that belong to that adult.
The experiences that created these mental images in the adult are not “accessible” to the child, but instead are deposited or pushed into the child, but without the experiential/contextual framework that created them.
In the psychoanalytic literature there are many papers and books that examine the psychology of the transgenerational consequences of the Holocaust for the children of the survivors as well as the perpetrators.
The rage and grief today over police brutality and racism are mostly due to America's never really having mourned the legacy of slavery. Mourning is a slow process related to remembering and relating to lost persons and things and, if everything goes Ok, saying “good bye” to such lost objects. What we see in the streets can be considered as an expression of shared mourning. I hope that it will take a positive course.
AD: In that vein, can we see your notion of a "linking object" as helpful in trying to understand some of the battles over statues, including over the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville in 2017, which you say in your introduction was part of the motive for writing this book?
I described linking objects and linking phenomena in 1972. A linking object is an item chosen by an adult mourner that unconsciously represents a meeting ground for the mental image of the lost person or thing and the corresponding image of the mourner.
Not every keepsake is a linking object; the item is a linking object if the mourner makes it “magical” and uses it as a “tool” for postponing the work of mourning. For example: after his father’s death, a young man picks up his father’s broken watch and hides it in a desk drawer. For the young man, this broken watch becomes “magical.” He becomes preoccupied with repairing the watch, but he never gets it repaired.
Some statues and monuments are shared linking objects. They connect many people to their ancestors’ losses or glories often without hurting or humiliating other large groups. But in the US some such shared linking objects humiliate another group (African Americans).
We are now more openly becoming aware that the beginning of American greatness was accompanied with the history of slavery. This reality now is hitting us openly. We need good leadership and open discussions to come up with ideas about what to do with some statues and monuments.
AD: Over the years, since discovering your work, I've found your concepts of "chosen trauma/glory" and "time collapse" enormously valuable. In this new book you introduce a concept I've not come across before in your work: "Entitlement ideology." Would you give us a sense of that and perhaps a current example?
Entitlement ideologies refer to a shared sense of entitlement to recover what was lost in reality and fantasy during the ancestors’ collective trauma. They deny difficulties and losses that had occurred during it, and imagine their large group as if it is 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 for the other.
The white supremacists openly verbalize their (fantasied and delusional) entitlement ideology, to have an America populated only by white people from selected locations.
Some entitlement ideologies are known by specific names in the literature. What Italians call “irredentism” (related to Italia Irredenta), what Greeks call “Megali Idea” (Great Idea) (an irredentist concept that expressed the goal of reviving the Byzantine Empire), what Turks call “Pan-Turanism” (bringing all the Turkic people together from Anatolia and Central Asia), what Serbs call “Christoslavism,” and what extreme religious Islamists of today call “the return of an Islamic Empire” are examples of entitlement ideologies.
We should remember the horrible consequences of the inflammation of the Serbian entitlement ideology (to have a greater Serbia) under Slobodan Milošević and be aware and careful about the inflammation of American white supremacists’ entitlement ideology.
AD: On pp.54-55 you speak of the "formal and informal systems of 'checks and balances' in a well-functioning democracy [that] prevent a leader's personality...from exerting undue influence over government and the governed." It seems ever more widely accepted by clinicians and observers today that such a system in this country is under the greatest and most severe strain ever. Is that an assessment you would share?
Yes.
AD: You refer to some of those clinicians (p.98) before, in ch.9, talking about "persons with exaggerated narcissism." Here you draw on the works of Kohut, Kernberg, and Jacobson. Tell us a bit more about this phenomenon of extreme or exaggerated narcissism. Is this a helpful way of understanding Donald Trump?
In my book I describe Charlottesville Psychoanalytic Study Group’s years-long study of persons with exaggerated narcissism. An in-depth description of such individuals’ behavior patterns, need to be number one, language peculiarities, inability to have empathy and other characteristics help us to see observable personality characteristics of Donald Trump.
AD: Sum up your hopes for Large Group Psychology, and who especially would benefit from reading it:
VV: First, today we see a preoccupation with Donald Trump’s tweets, verbalizations, and behavior patterns. In the book the reader will learn about narcissistic personality organization, why it evolves and how it can lead to destructive or reparative societal processes. Such knowledge will help the reader to have a better understanding of Donald Trump and his influence on his followers.
Second, there are severe societal/political divisions in the USA. The reader will read why there is a need to have allies and enemies in human nature.
Third, racism, ethnic prejudice, removing or not removing some statues are discussed. In the book I describe the experience and views of an immigrant to the USA in late 1950s on these issues.
Fourth this book illustrates the need to have an in depth psychological/historical understanding of large groups and the meaning and the power of large group identity in order to find new solutions for political/societal problems.
Fifth, I wrote this book before the COVID-19 pandemic started to illustrate shared psychological processes of the Trump-era America and the world. The corona virus pandemic made me to realize that deeper knowledge of such psychological processes is sought by the reader. At the present time the personality of political leaders, racism, societal/political divisions and political propaganda preoccupy public interest.
Sixth and finally, this book is written without my hiding behind technical psychoanalytic terms. It is easily readable.
AD: Having finished this book, do you have other projects on the go at the moment--other books in the works?
VV: I just finished writing another book. Soon I will send my manuscript to my publisher. This one is on non-chemical addictions. I describe how some individuals remember their childhood traumas and their own “solutions” with compulsive actions. I hope that this book will also help the reader to have a deeper understanding of some political leaders’ repeating actions.
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