Photo by Matt Kelly

Vamik Volkan

March 19, 2004

By Elizabeth Kiem

For 25 years, Dr. Vamik Volkan, professor emeritus of psychiatry at U.Va., has invited unusual “patients” to his couch. Focusing on issues that often date back centuries, Volkan’s brand of analysis addresses conflicts on a truly global scale. His “patients,” to name a few, are no less than the states of Israel, Palestine, Estonia, Russia, Turkey and Greece.

Volkan, who also founded U.Va.’s Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction, calls his work “unofficial diplomacy,” but an international jury has characterized it as “an outstanding contribution to psychotherapy worldwide” and awarded him the 2003 Sigmund Freud award for psychotherapy.

“When Freud found psychoanalysis for individual treatment, he was interested in human nature, but in America it developed as a medical condition,” said Volkan. “I’m going beyond that. … [My study] is not about the individual mind.”

Volkan said his debt to Freud lies in the doctor’s contribution to large group analysis and the study of human nature in societies. Volkan’s own initiative is to analyze societies as bodies with a shared mind, and to treat those societies with the tools of psychoanalysis.

Volkan began his career in psychopolitical studies in 1980, when he had been teaching psychiatry at U.Va. for nearly two decades. As co-chair of an American Psychiatric Association committee that invited a group of high-level Palestinians and Israelis to Washington, Volkan analyzed the psychological factors contributing to the political impasse in the Middle East. The sessions continued for six years and helped Volkan and his colleagues develop a methodology for psychological diplomacy.

“We learned that when groups regress and are full of murderous views of each other, realpolitik does not work,” Volkan said. “So what evolved is to do the foundation work and make influential people work through their emotional perceptions of the other side for a more realistic perception.”

At the conclusion of the Arab/Israeli dialogues, Volkan called upon the other members of his APA team — policy advisers, lawyers, historians and other psychoanalysts — to create an institution dedicated to furthering the work of conflict resolution and trauma healing. He founded the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at U.Va. in 1987 and served as its president until his retirement in 2002. The center, which continues to work according to Volkan’s mission, is unique in the world as a conflict-resolution organization located within a medical school.

Joseph Montville, a former Foreign Service official at the State Department and veteran CSMHI faculty member, said the center has done much to establish psychodynamics as a powerful tool in helping victims of ethnic trauma.

“ Healing history emerged as one of the most important concepts in our work, and Vamik is one of the great intellectual leaders in the field,” he said.

During the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, CSMHI gained an official contract with the Russian Duma [Parliament] to investigate the psychology of Soviet-American relations. In that endeavor, current events outran the initial mission, and Volkan’s team found themselves unexpected counselors in one of the most world-shaking geopolitical divorces in modern times.

“When we were doing this, we didn’t know we were part of history,” recalled Volkan. “They were very desperate, and they were open,” he said of his Soviet subjects.

The break-up of the Soviet Union created ample opportunity for specialists to study large-group psychology in action. From the Baltics to the Caucasus, ethnic tension and lingering resentment were a rampant problem for post-Soviet nation building. In this period, Volkan was active with former President Jimmy Carter’s International Negotiation Network, which sought peaceful intervention in crisis zones.

A native of Cyprus, Volkan has both a personal and professional interest in relations between Greeks and Turks, and acknowledges his experience growing up in the midst of ethnic strife as an important factor in his career.

Montville said that in addition to his clinical work, Volkan’s prolific writing has helped establish him as “the number one psychoanalyst/psychologist in the world in terms of relating dynamic theory and ethnic conflict and third-party intervention.”

Volkan has authored or co-authored more than 30 books and is presently translating many of his case studies into his native Turkish as part of his effort to establish that country’s first official school of psychoanalysis.

In his latest book, “Blind Trust,” Volkan offers a psychoanalytical look at terrorism, crisis leadership and, yes, pre-emptive warfare.

Currently, Volkan is finishing a six-month residency at the Austen Riggs Center in Boston. He returns with his wife to Charlottesville in mid-March, but a demanding speaking calendar will soon have him traveling again.

“There is no psychoanalytical organization in this country that has not asked me to talk,” he said with a laugh. “But 15 years ago they looked at me like a strange fellow.”