Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace by Vamik D. Volkan (review) (2015)

group, Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring 2015 85 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Christine Schmidt, LCSW, 26 Court Street, Suite 2604, Brooklyn, NY 11242. E-mail: cschmidt535@gmail.com. Book Review Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace. By Vamik D. Volkan. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2013, 496 pp. Reviewed by Christine Schmidt1 Racial, ethnic, religious, and gender prejudices are developed, sustained, and transmitted across generations. Such prejudices lead to stereotypes that are embedded in one’s large-group identity. War, terrorism, genocide, and ethnoreligious conflict are carried out in the name of large-group identity and reflect societal regression. Much of our psychoanalytic understanding about global conflict comes from Dr. Vamik Volkan’s scholarly writings about ethnic tension, racism, national identity, terrorism, societal trauma, transgenerational transmissions, and leader–follower relationships. Dr. Volkan is a towering intellectual, prolific writer, and committed peace activist. Born in Cyprus of Turkish ancestry, he completed his medical studies in the United States pursuant to his careers as a psychoanalyst, medical administrator , and political psychologist in conflict zones. He directed the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia from 1987 to 2002, which he also founded, and, as an active member of an interdisciplinary team, facilitated dialogues between enemies. He was a member of former president Jimmy Carter’s International Negotiation Network from 1989 to 1998, and as a result of his renowned international dialogue efforts, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times between 2005 and 2008. Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace is Dr. Volkan’s professional memoir of his work as a psychoanalytic political psychologist. He recounts lessons learned working with enemy groups representing Egyptians, Palestinians, and Israelis; Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks; Armenians and Azerbaijanis ; and Serbs and Croats. In the tension-packed psychopolitical dialogues with issn 0362-4021 © 2015 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society 86 schmidt representatives from enemy groups, he and his cofacilitators supported participants’ expressions of their individual feelings, thoughts, and beliefs as well as their groups’ sentiments, culminating in experiences of hearing each other for the first time and beginning to understand the reality of “the other” as distinct from an internalized stereotype. Volkan defines and illustrates key psychological concepts: large-group identity, linking objects, and the Tree Model. Large-group identity offers individuals a sense of sameness by way of a shared place, nation, ethnicity, or religion. When a large group is attacked, humiliated, threatened, or killed by others who identify with another large group, the attacked population becomes obsessed and puts inordinate resources into protection and repair. For example, in the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., many Americans far removed from the attacked sites felt they had been attacked too. Bigotry flourished, and a societal regression resulted in targeting American residents of South Asian and Middle Eastern origin as if they were members of the enemy large group. Volkan challenges us to consider how our conscious and unconscious stereotyped perceptions about our own group and the group we consider “the other” influence our sense of agency in the world and how we interact with others. In this dynamic way, our individual identity both informs and is informed by our membership in large groups. Linking object refers to an item that corresponds to the mental image of the lost person or place. It is contaminated with the dead and the damaged self and is produced by complicated mourning that keeps the loss unassimilated and unintegrated. The meaning of the externalized representation of loss does not fade, as happens with uncomplicated loss. Linking objects can be symbols for large groups that have suffered a shared traumatic loss and thus become symbols of large-group identity. Volkan offers examples: Palestinians who kept keys of homes that had been bulldozed; a concentration camp survivor for whom a screw from a packing box triggered the trauma of forced leaving and deportation; and photographs of disappeared Croatian sons and husbands that were placed in memorial shrines in survivors’ homes, thereby endowing sanctity to the lost persons. Mourning can become complicated when it is connected...