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"Why do they hate us so?" Vamik Volkan has the most compelling, humane, and universal response to the riddle of our time. In this extraordinary and timely book, Volkan explains better than anyone the relationship between large-group identities and massive traumas and current events and ongoing conflicts around the world, including those related to the horrific attacks of 9/11. In Killing in the Name of Identity, Volkan has taken us further, and deeper, into the dark and vulnerable collective mind of ethnic, religious, cultural, and national group conflict. Through his eyes and words, we find ourselves looking into and making contact with the universal elements present in humanity and in ourselves, which converge in producing the conditions for great human tragedies. No one understands nor writes about large-group terror and violence in a more compassionate and profoundly instructive way.
2021 Gradiva Award Winner Following the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, numerous recent, and fatal, attacks on mosques, churches, and synagogues occurring worldwide, and increasing totalitarianism and paranoia spreading through many countries, Dr Vamik Volkan could no longer ignore the urge to write a new book about large-group problems. In many countries, people are asking the metaphorical question "Who are we now?" and coming up with seemingly opposite answers. This book looks into the reasons why this is happening. With a summary of Sigmund Freud's ideas about large groups - which focus on the individual - Dr Volkan builds on this base to explain what lar...
Vamik Volkan examines the impact of past and present historical events, cultural elements, political movements and their mental images on the psyche of individuals. Beginning with the history of the debates concerning the relevance of external events to the human psyche, Volkan moves on to look at the spread of psychoanalysis worldwide and the need to become familiar with the cultural, historical, and political issues when working abroad. The remaining chapters follow the story of a successful businessman who calls himself a “Muslim Armenian”. His psychological journey clearly illustrates how ghosts from the past can remain alive and active in our lives, and how a clear understanding of ...
This book examines adults' identifications and internal relationships with their siblings' mental representations. The authors believe that the best way to illustrate clinical formulations and psychoanalytic theoretical concepts is to provide detailed clinical data. The influence of childhood sibling experiences and associated unconscious fantasies, in their own right, in adults' personality characteristics, behaviour patterns, and symptoms are presented from seventeen case reports. Clinicians who have patients with fear of pregnancy, claustrophobia, incestuous fantasies, extreme dependency on or murderous rage against siblings, guilt due to the death of a sister or brother in childhood, replacement child syndrome, history of adoption, certain types of animal phobias and related issues will find this volume most helpful. The authors have made a rare, but needed, psychoanalytic contribution that examines mental representations of sisters and brothers in our daily lives.
The Third Reich in the Unconscious: TransgenerationalTransmission and Its Consequences examines the effects of the Holocaust on second-generation survivors and specifically describes how historical images and trauma are transferred. The authors reveal the many ways in which the psychological legacy of the Nazi regime manifests itself in subsequent generations and how psychopathology, if present, can assume a number of different forms. Among the detailed case histories and treatment considerations, the text provides insight for developing strategies that will tame and eventually prevent transgenerational transmission.
Blind Trust is the culmination of more than three decades of profound immersion in the most pressing sociopolitical conflicts of our time, by the psychoanalyst with probably the most direct experience with such issues of any in the world. Author Vamik Volkan applies his knowledge of depth psychology to the turbulent and destructive human experiences in the current cauldrons of the greatest unrest and disaster throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Illuminating the etiologic bases of war, revolution, massacres, and terror, as these have disturbed the world from ancient times to modern civilization, his voice speaks for the imperative of reason and the application of modern analytic kno...
Aside from the many political, cultural and economic aspects of the present refugee crisis in Europe, it is also crucial to consider the psychological element. In our fast-changing world, globalisation, advances in communication technology, fast travel, terrorism and now the refugee crisis make psychoanalytic investigation of the Other a major necessity. Psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan, who left Cyprus for the US as a young man, brings his own experiences as an immigrant to bear on this study of the psychology of immigrants and refugees, and of those who cross paths with them. In Part 1, case examples illustrate the impact of traumatic experiences, group identity issues, and how traumas embedded in the experience of immigrants and refugees can be passed down from one generation to the next. Part 2 focuses on the host countries, considering the evolution of prejudice and how fear of newcomers can affect everything from international politics to the way we behave as individuals. Volkan also considers the psychology of borders, from the Berlin Wall to Donald Trump.
This book relates the psychoanalytic journey of a man in his thirties, a grandson of a high-level SS officer, whose case illustrates how individuals can sometimes suffer greatly or cause the suffering of other innocent persons, simply because they are descendants of perpetrators. In it, technical considerations in treating such an individual, including countertransference issues and concepts related to transgenerational transmissions-for example, identification, depositing, dissociation, encapsulation, and remembering through actions-are explored. The man had a repeating daydream of carrying a big egg under his arm. The imagined egg, representing his encapsulated dissociated state, contained the mental representation of his Nazi grandfather and his grandfather's victims, along with images of most tragic historical events. He attempted to turn his grandfather's image from a life-taker to a life-giver and wished to own the older man's grandiose specialness, while fearing the loss of his own life. These opposite aims created unnamed "catastrophes".
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How we cope with grief and come to terms with the death of a loved one shapes our world. In this comprehensive guide to the mourning process, Dr Volkan, a world-recognised authority on grief, shows how each mourning is as individualised as our fingerprints, encoded with our past history of losses. Anecdotal and compassionate, this is a profoundly moving and informative study of how grief and loss shape all our lives.