Vamik Volkan on Racism and Group Psychology
I'm delighted to be able to report that on the weekend I received two books, one of which I have read: Vamik Volkan, Large-Group Psychology: Racism, Societal Divisions, Narcissistic Leaders and Who We Are We Now (Phoenix, 2020), 144pp.
When I saw the book was forthcoming earlier this year, I wrote to Dr. Volkan about an interview, and he has kindly consented. I'm putting questions together for that now and will post his thoughts as soon as I have them.
The other book the publisher kindly sent to me is a biography of Volkan: Ferhat Atik, A Psychoanalyst on His Own Couch: A Biography of Vamık Volkan and His Psychoanalytic and Psychopolitical Concepts, published not quite a year ago. I'm eagerly looking forward to reading it not least because even the bits and pieces of Volkan's life that I have read (some of which he shares in the moving introduction to the group psychology book noted above) are moving and fascinating indeed.
In the meantime, let me also point you to at least a couple of other books. I first came across Volkan's work when I was doing research on ISIS about five years ago. For those who read their online propaganda magazine Dabiq, as I did in detail, you quickly saw that there were manifold and many uses and abuses of Crusades history. Trying to puzzle through what was going on led me first to Charles Strozier (a Harvard historian, Lincoln scholar, and psychoanalyst in New York City, and author, inter alia, of the invaluable biography of Heinz Kohut, the well-known Chicago psychoanalyst).
Strozier had edited the collection The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History. That book, valuable in itself, also introduced me to Volkan, whose work on religious-political conflict in the Balkans and elsewhere has been very helpful in trying to understand the ISIS mindset, as well as Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox religious conflicts in the twentieth century, about which I have a book coming out late this year.
For those new to Volkan, he has been very prolific, so knowing where to begin might be daunting. Might I suggest you begin with the book I first found so valuable? That was his 1998 book Bloodlines. In it I first encountered Volkan's key ideas of "chosen glory," "chosen trauma," and "time collapse," all of which have been very revealing when applied to some of the religious and historiographical conflicts I have studied and written about. More recently, and in a similar vein, there is his 2013 book Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace.
Stay tuned for the interview, and further discussions of Volkan's new book on group psychology.
When I saw the book was forthcoming earlier this year, I wrote to Dr. Volkan about an interview, and he has kindly consented. I'm putting questions together for that now and will post his thoughts as soon as I have them.
The other book the publisher kindly sent to me is a biography of Volkan: Ferhat Atik, A Psychoanalyst on His Own Couch: A Biography of Vamık Volkan and His Psychoanalytic and Psychopolitical Concepts, published not quite a year ago. I'm eagerly looking forward to reading it not least because even the bits and pieces of Volkan's life that I have read (some of which he shares in the moving introduction to the group psychology book noted above) are moving and fascinating indeed.
In the meantime, let me also point you to at least a couple of other books. I first came across Volkan's work when I was doing research on ISIS about five years ago. For those who read their online propaganda magazine Dabiq, as I did in detail, you quickly saw that there were manifold and many uses and abuses of Crusades history. Trying to puzzle through what was going on led me first to Charles Strozier (a Harvard historian, Lincoln scholar, and psychoanalyst in New York City, and author, inter alia, of the invaluable biography of Heinz Kohut, the well-known Chicago psychoanalyst).
Strozier had edited the collection The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History. That book, valuable in itself, also introduced me to Volkan, whose work on religious-political conflict in the Balkans and elsewhere has been very helpful in trying to understand the ISIS mindset, as well as Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox religious conflicts in the twentieth century, about which I have a book coming out late this year.
For those new to Volkan, he has been very prolific, so knowing where to begin might be daunting. Might I suggest you begin with the book I first found so valuable? That was his 1998 book Bloodlines. In it I first encountered Volkan's key ideas of "chosen glory," "chosen trauma," and "time collapse," all of which have been very revealing when applied to some of the religious and historiographical conflicts I have studied and written about. More recently, and in a similar vein, there is his 2013 book Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace.
Stay tuned for the interview, and further discussions of Volkan's new book on group psychology.
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