Vamik Volkan
Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry
Founder, Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction
University of Virginia
"Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism"
November 12, 2002

Vamik Volkan: We need to consider four concepts, or four elements. Number one is large group identity. Number two is large group rituals. When I say large groups I am talking about tens of thousands of people; millions of people. I am talking about ethnic, national, religious, and ideological large groups. Number three, large group regression--going back. And, number four, the role of the political leaders in taming or inflaming the previous three elements. Let me start with the first one--large group identity.

All of us in this room have many, many identities. Some of us are political scientists, some of us are psychoanalysts, some of us are photographers, some of us are carpenters. We belong to the Democratic Party, we belong to the Republican Party. We have identities. I call them "sub-identities." That is to say, if I stop being a democrat and I become a republican, I will have anxiety if this change gets connected with some kind of internal danger in me from my childhood. Like, for instance, losing my mother's love. Then I get anxious. Otherwise, it is not problematic for me to stop being a psychiatrist and become a gardener. Those kind of identities are on the surface--they are sub-identities.

But, there is something also called "core identity." The core identity, as described by Erik Erikson, is a "sustained feeling of inner sameness while sharing some character traits with others." When you go to bed and you are sleepy, you feel different but you are still the same person. You have a continuum--a past, present and future. I am not going to focus on that, though, because our time is very limited.

One of the elements of this "core identity" is that, when you lose that, you do not just feel anxious, you feel terrified. Some of our patients, for example, we can catch them at the time when their "core identity" gets fragmented. They regress and get into psychosis. That is a horrifying experience. And, right away, that person says, "I am Nixon," or, "I am Mother Teresa." You cannot do without this core identity. Its death is more horrifying than physical death. You will come to that when you see how people hold onto their ethnic identity. The idea of giving it up becomes so much more emotionally important for them.

The next one is that, one element of this "core identity" is that it also includes your large group identity--your ethnic, national, religious or ideological identity. This is not easy to understand in America. Why? Because America is a continent--it is a country of people from many different cultures put together. They are all Americans. But, if you go to more cohesive cultures--Poland, Korea or Bulgaria--then you will see how this inner-sameness is very much connected with their large group identity.

When we bring enemy representatives together--Arabs and Israelis, Turks and Greeks, Estonians and Russians--they come to meetings and often give speeches. Since we are not diplomats, they do not have any papers and, if they are going to give speeches we tell them, "Mr. President or Mr. Former President, you can give that speech in the parliament, but here you cannot give speeches. Just say whatever comes to your mind." This is the way that we bring them together and after awhile they talk about things that they would never talk about officially.

One of the things they talk about is identity. They become spokespersons of their large group identity. You hear that they will do anything to protect their large group identity if it is threatened or under some kind of stress. They will die or they will kill. This is what you hear whoever you bring together

We had these laboratories for twenty to twenty-five years and learned the importance of this abstract thing. You cannot touch it. What in the heck is large group identity? When you hear people who are running their countries, this abstract thing contaminates everything. It contaminates the legal issues, the military issues--everything. This is large group identity.

Number two--large group rituals. During the last twenty-five to thirty years that I have been doing this, slowly we have figured out that large groups--ethnic groups--in peace and in war, they relate to each other in ritualistic fashions. The main aim of these rituals is to protect this abstract thing, this abstract thing called belonging, "we-ness."

Let us just start from very simple rituals. Well, we have flags. Nobody cares to see 10 American flags in a routine day, but after September 11, you notice them. We have anniversary reactions. We remember glories and trauma of the past. We remember old heroes. If you are in Charlottesville, you have to remember Thomas Jefferson. I remember everyday because one of the direct descendents of Thomas Jefferson works at the Center of Study of Mind and Human Interaction. So, every morning I say hello to Thomas Jefferson.

We have these kind of rituals, but large groups live next to each other. If you are in Macedonia, you live next to Greece. And Greece says, "thou shalt not use the name Macedonia because Macedonia is included in my identity!" All these identities are abstract things.

They get into certain rituals and we have made a list of them, but again to save time, I will tell you how these rituals are under two principals. They live together, but they have to hold a gap between themselves because in psychoanalysis we have projection. Whenever we do not like something, I project on him or on you, and I say, "He stinks and I--I smell so good." The whole idea is that whatever I projected on you should not come back on me. Therefore, all the rituals between two groups are governed by two principals. It says that I cannot be the same as someone else. Why? If I am projecting something on another person and I am the same as that person, that means that what I projected comes back to me. I should have a psychological border between my group and your group.

Enemies are real. If someone is shooting at you, you had better protect yourself. But, enemies are also always fantasized because, once you have an enemy, you are also going to project things in the enemy. They are a combination of reality and fantasy.

I will show you one of the rituals, called purification. Every time a group goes through something like new elections, purification takes place. There is going to be new identity under this new party. That means they are going to purify something unwanted. Purification is a large group becoming a snake. Large groups are snakes--they shed off their skins as they go through time, events, and changes. As we see how they will become malignant, later on, they shed things so that they can say, "now we are we." This abstract thing called large group identity is not something stable. It changes through rituals.

Next, is regression. Regression is a very typical term that we psychiatrists use all the time. For example, after September 11, a young lady began to eat macaroni and cheese and nothing else. What does that mean? It means that she became so psychologically scared that she had to go back to her childhood to have something soothing. As a child, she liked macaroni and cheese. So now as an adult, she began eating macaroni and cheese. That is called regression.

What we found out is that large groups, national groups, ethnic groups--they also regress. This is something brand new. Our godfather--Sigmund Freud--had written about large group psychology and he said that followers got together, they identified with each other, and they supported the leader. If a group is under regression, then we go and rally around the leader and there are different levels of regression. Thank goodness that in America we do not loose our individuality. You can imagine if a group regresses individual people do not matter and you just become part of the large group and your individuality become secondary.

I was very fascinated with this large group regression and now I am on my twenty-fifth symptom of large group regression. Again, for the sake of brevity I will not tell you all these things what happens when a large group regresses. I will only tell you a few things.

One of them is that they become extremely preoccupied with minor differences between themselves and the next group. Even Freud had written a paragraph on this. Like how the people of Portugal separate themselves from people in Spain and how minor differences become important between Northern and Southern Germans. He thought that this was a kind of playful and not deadly way of expressing regression.

What we find out as we go around the globe is that this is one of the deadliest rituals you can have. What is the meaning of it? There are major differences. I speak one language, you speak another language. I have this religion, you have this religion. There are major differences. They are not as deadly is minor differences. Minor difference is the last border to separate your identity, to keep your identity away from the other. In politics, one of the most sensitive times is when opposing parties come very close to make agreements. The differences between them becomes very minor.

The next one is that in regression, what I call "chosen trauma" becomes reactivated. Chosen trauma is one of the elements of large group identity, which means that identity is specific.

As a psychoanalyst, if I went to talk to my diplomat friends and said to them, "my large group is my mother," which is true, I can have an ear to listen to me. Chosen traumas make a large group's identity specific. What is a chosen trauma? Chosen trauma is an even that occurred years ago--sometimes decades or centuries ago--during which time the group felt helpless, humiliated and had many losses, and the group could not express their aggression. They could not be assertive. So, they pass these tasks to next generations. As they past these tasks--revenge, grieving, stopping humiliation, stopping helplessness--they went on to next generations.

Say that you are the children of a traumatized group and your traumatized parents are passing such tasks to all of you. All these tasks are related to the same event. The shared mental image of that event becomes a group marker. The reactivation of it makes the group members cohesive. If a large group regresses that means they have to find ways to pump up their group identity.

One of the things they do, paradoxically, is that they pump up something negative. They bring up something negative that happened to their ancestors in order to feel cohesive. That is what I mean by chosen trauma. It becomes deadly. The other one--regression--is that purification slowly becomes malignant. When I say malignant, I mean killing. The Greeks won their war of purification one hundred years ago. They purified their language. Nobody died.

Latvia won their re-independence from the Soviet Union. If you go to Latvian National Cemetery, one gravestone has a swastika, one a hammer and sickle, and the next one has a cross. So, I can tell you how this country was internally fragmented. Some of them were Nazis, some of them were Communists, some of them were Nationalists. Suddenly they are independent and they are going to be all together. Who are they now? They projected everything toward twenty Russian corpses who were in the National Cemetery. They wanted to purify the National Cemetery and Yeltsin was going crazy as he was drinking.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and cultural cleansing are both additional examples of regression.

I told you something about identity, rituals, and how these rituals become very malignant in regression. The leader inflames or tames it.

Let us briefly compare two contemporaries: Mandela and Milosevic. Mandela knows that his party is going to come to power. He has his own people who meet. When Mandela is called to do something, he goes out, comes back, and finds everyone smiling. He asks what has happened during his absence of a half an hour. They say that they have changed the national anthem because the original national anthem for the South African whites says nasty things about African blacks. Mandela says that they cannot do that because if they take away their symbolic identity, that is not a nice thing to do.

So, today if you go to South Africa, they have two national anthems--one after the other. That takes some guts to do it. But, it did not become malignant. It did not lead to people killing people, masses, riots and so on. It was internalized. They have a high occurrence of rape, so it turned more internally. This is also known by South Africans. It is possibly the remnants of living under oppression. Everything is not lovey-dovey. But, Mandela stopped the process from becoming malignant. Milosevic, on the other hand, did the opposite and things became very malignant.

Basically, then, we study the psychology of large group processes, but not by sitting in this little office, here. We travel around the globe and go to unbelievable places. We bring enemy groups together, with struggle, and sometimes when it is possible, we also develop techniques to try to help them find ways to coexist more peacefully. One way is the tree model in which the basic principles come from psychoanalysis. We do not give any advice. We take the resistances away so that they can talk and we make a time expansion. New insights come up here and we take these insights and they spread. America loves instant coffee--we cannot find money because everyone wants to do peace by instant coffee method. And, ours is not.