Among the approaches to analyzing and Atreating@ conflict is the psychoanalytic approach that regards the past traumas of the conflict as pivotal. One of the pioneers of this approach is, coincidentally, a Turkish Cypriot by birth, Vamik Volkan, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Volkan has contributed, in several articles and books, to a theory of conflict resolution that stresses these elements of Apsychohistory.@ Here, in an excellent summation of this approach, is the foreword to Volkan=s Cyprus---War and Adaptation: A Psychoanalytic History of Two Ethnic Groups in Conflict (University Press of Virginia, 1979), which is excerpted elsewhere in this site. John Mack, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School at The Cambridge Hospital.
     Another interesting article on the many dimensions of ethnic conflict, commissioned by the U.N., can be accessed from the end of this article.

It may be argued that there is no psychohistory, but only history. The noted historian Jacques Barzun has warned students against expecting from psychology or any other allied discipline easier answers to history's complex questions. The study of history cannot, he writes, be anything "except the old familiar search for documents and the play of imagination and judgment upon them." Yet historians have always appreciated the power of human will and emotion to influence events. The ambition and fear, the pain and desire of individual human beings have been recognized since ancient times as important agencies in the determination of historical change. "It is evident" Barzun wrote, "that all the studies which deal with man's activities are branches of psychology" (p. 22). Less well appreciated, perhaps, and surely not as well understood, have been the ways in which the psychology of large groups may influence historical events.

Among such groups none are more important for history than those who are united by language, custom, racial characteristics, and an intense attachment to a particular geographic land area, to make up a distinct nationality. But until recently insights about the role of individual and collective psychological forces in the study of history have been offered to a large degree haphazardly, according to the interest, availability of materials, suitability of subject matter, and psychological gifts and orientation of particular historians. Whereas a historian might willingly acknowledge his concentration or expertise in the economic or military aspects of history, he would be unlikely to claim that he was a psychologically minded, much less a "psycho' '-historian, however much he might base his interpretation of events upon the motives of this or that leader or the national characteristics of a particular people. This is changing now, especially since the work of Erik Erikson. Among historians there are quite a number who recognize not only that psychological factors are important for history but that special training and study are necessary to use psychological data accurately and effectively. Similarly, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists who seek to study biographical and other historical subjects are recognizing increasingly the importance of the political and cultural context and the cautions and restraints which must be applied to the use of psychological evidence obtained from both documents and interviews.

Nations, even more than individuals, have difficulty accepting responsibility for aggression, and prefer to stress the pain of their histories, the provocations which gave rise to warlike acts, their experience as victims, and the resulting justifications for their hostile behavior. Rarely does a people acknowledge, for example, the aggression which must lie behind the establishment of itself as a new nation or its expansion to fulfill the collective myth of its territorial destiny. Yet such achievements can hardly be accomplished except at the expense, even the destruction, of another people.

In this book Vamik Volkan reviews psychoanalytic contributions to the study of international conflict and shows that such contributions as do exist are not based on actual studies of conflict situations. The case study approach, as employed by Freud and his followers, which has yielded such monumental contributions to the understanding of individual psychology, has rarely been applied to actual instances of intergroup conflict, and hardly ever to problems of inter-nation strife.

Volkan's study is a unique, pioneering exception. Advantageously suited for this work by virtue of his Turkish and Cypriot background, Dr. Volkan is, in addition, a gifted psychoanalytic clinical practitioner and theorist, who has already made significant contributions to the psychoanalytic theory of human relationships. He has familiarized himself fully with the political and cultural history of Cyprus in its Greek as well as its Turkish dimension. This work is, therefore, without precedent as a study in depth of the psychology of two ethnic groups engaged in a historical conflict. There is to my knowledge no study of the collective psychology of war that is anything like it.

Freud wrote like an early discoverer, identifying vast regions, as yet unexplored, to which the science he developed might someday make a contribution. The problem of conflict between ethnic groups was one such region. In Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, Freud wrote: "it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other---like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of 'the narcissism of minor dif- ferences,' a name which does not do much to explain it."' One could readily add to such a list, English and Irish, Indians and Pakistani, Arabs and Jews, and Turks and Greeks, especially on the island of Cyprus where their proximity has been so close. Freud's passing attention to the problem of conflict between national groups suggested that its psychological aspect belongs, broadly speaking, in the area of narcissism. By this is meant that the hostility which so readily erupts between such groups derives from the effect over time that the proximity of one group has had upon the way the members of another group feel about themselves, individually and collectively. Hostility, as the contemporary psychoanalyst Gregory Rochlin has written, arises in defense of the self. " Another individual or a group is likely to be perceived as an enemy when that person or group, rightly or wrongly, is seen as threatening the worth or the survival of the self.

In his study of the historical conflict between Greeks and Turks on the island of Cyprus, Dr. Volkan confronts many aspects of the narcissism of inter-nation conflict. Some of these areas he has been able to explore fully.Where his material has not permitted a full examination, he has indicated the directions in which future work must go. No work in this field from now on can, I believe, afford to ignore his contribution. I shall attempt here to list the principal aspects of conflict between ethnic groups, as set forth or suggested in this study, upon which psychoanalytic understanding may shed light.

1. The identity of self and nation. The emotional relationship between the individual and the nation---or the idea of the nationoverrides all of the dimensions of interethnic conflict. The individual human being derives much of his sense of self and self worth from identification with a nation, with its people, language, and customs, and, above all, with a land defined by definite borders. Boundaries, walls, enclaves, and cages, as this study shows, take on powerful meanings if they come to be related to the continuity and dimensions of the self.

The self-esteem of a people rises and falls with the fate of its nation. A people who define themselves as comprising a nation, or an emerging one, but who cannot give it geographic actuality, live in a constant condition of injured self-regard and inner rage. The nation and the idea of the self are in many ways fused. A political leader may intensify and cement this attachment, this identity of self and nation, if he can effectively represent to the people nationalistic ideals with which they can identify at a personal, emotional level.

Primitive meanings (not pathological) of motherhood and fatherhood are contained in the idea of the country or nation. The nation serves fundamental caring, protective, and guiding needs which relate to the basic security of the individual and the governance of the self. Any political thinker who seeks a fellowship of all mankind beyond allegiances to nation states must recognize the psychological meaning of the identity of the self with the nation. Failure to do so will limit such concepts as the "brotherhood of man" to philosophical and Utopian visions and imaginings.

2. The problem of historical grievances. As Dr. Volkan shows in this book, the Greeks and Turks on Cyprus have a history of strife, which has grown out of their proximity to each other. In their case the history is relatively short---only four centuries---but it is a period filled with tragedy and conflict, with conquest, war, and victimization. The contemporary conflict on Cyprus, as in any similar struggle between two ethnic groups, must be seen in the context of the accumulated memories and historical hurts which each people has experienced at the hands of the other. As in the case of the individual, the memories of actual hurt have mingled for a whole people with fantasies of injury at the hands of the other. Each nation has monuments, living and dead (see Chapter VII), which not only embody the losses of the war just fought, or the hurts just suffered, but represent the accrued griefs of the centuries. Furthermore, where the suffering has been as intense as it has on Cyprus, and the injuries sustained so profound, the other side readily becomes the object of blame for tragedies and hurts for which it cannot be altogether responsible.

Thus, in the case of conflict between ethnic groups, there is a history of real hurts and atrocities for which ample evidence is easily found---the archives of documents (especially photographs) and memory---to which a people may convincingly point to justify the perpetuation of an attitude of hostility toward the other people. Scholarly historical works when written by members of one ethnic group or the other, even when they are of the highest quality, are rarely of value in clarifying the "facts" or "realities" of the conflict. For such studies are very likely to reflect the effort, often unconscious, of each historian to construct the conflict, to tell his country's story, in a fashion which will place blame on the other people and redound to the credit of his own. In such works, the superiority and innocence of one's own people and the inferiority and aggressive intransigence of the other are likely, however subtly, to emerge.

3. The intergenerational transmission of attitudes toward the 'other.= Mothers, fathers, older siblings, and other relatives begin from infancy to transmit through what they tell their children, by verbal nuance and through a variety of nonverbal gestures and other cues, attitudes toward the other ethnic group which is gradually, but inevitably, incorporated into the thinking of the next generation of children. Later, teachers, media personalities, politicians, and other adults will underscore and contribute to these early attitudes. Dr. Volkan describes how a Turkish mother "is apt to sanction the anxiety of her child about a Greek visitor who had been a target of her own externalization of the unwanted parts of herself and her intemalized world." If admiration toward another ethnic group is conveyed, it is likely to be mixed with jealousy and hostility. Children are thus consciously and unconsciously drawn into the process of inter-nation conflict by adults and older children. Because children constitute the richest resource that a society possesses for the conduct of its future wars, governments may be reluctant to permit the systematic study of the mechanisms whereby their country's young people incorporate the elements of national identity, especially political attitudes, into their emerging self-concepts.

4. Splitting externalizing, and mirroring: the demonization of the "other. " An Israeli journalist said recently: "We aren't fighting each other. We fight masks of the devil that each side has painted on the other." There is a human tendency to displace onto others, to split away and externalize the negative aspects of oneself, the dimensions one wishes not to acknowledge, or for which one will not or cannot take responsibility. Disacknowledged aspects of the self may be reflected or mirrored by the other. Volkan writes, "Cypriot Turks make Cypriot Greeks the target of their externalization of 'all bad' self- and object representations." Virtue is the possession of oneself or one's group. Evil resides in the other. At a one-to-one level individuals whom one knows only slightly if at all are the most convenient objects of externalization, especially if there has been some real or imagined suffering at that person's hands. In one-to-one relationships actual contact in a constructive atmosphere may undercut such externalization or scapegoating.

In the case of large groups, especially national groups which have lived in close proximity, there are several factors that favor the unrestrained use of the other for splitting and externalization. Ambiguities of good and evil are difficult to see. The recognition of shared blame becomes virtually impossible. First, there is, generally, support and encouragement on the part of political leaders, the mass media, and other opinion makers for the negative or devalued view of the other people as a group. When the devaluation of an ethnic group becomes a matter of national policy, especially when directed by a demagogic leader, mass murder and genocide are likely to eventuate. Second, historically enforced and reinforced isolation of national groups from each other prevents the modification of the perception of the other which reality and reason might provide. Their confinement in enclaves fostered for Turkish Cypriots perceptions of the Greeks outside which supported a secure world view and bolstered the self-esteem of Turks, but which subjected them to later shocks. Once freed from the enclaves, as Dr. Volkan points out, "this world has now gone, and its inhabitants were faced with the humiliating recognition that a prosperous Greek life-style confronted them on every hand." Third, there is no equivalent at a group or collective level to the superego restraints which can operate at an individual level to curb hostile or violent impulses. Fourth, the history of inter-nation warfare, suffering, and actual mutual victimization provides a nearly endless supply of justification to confirm the view of the other people as vicious and barbaric, or otherwise hateful and less than human. Finally, the continuing existence of conflicting interests, such as disputes over land and boundaries, or the perpetuation of actual threats to national security which each side represents to the other fosters psychological regression and the emergence of splitting, externalization, and other primitive collective psychological mechanisms. All of the above factors, which promote the hateful devaluing of one people by another, may result more readily if aspects of child-rearing or of a society's family life foster externalization of the superego or of authority in general. However, this need not be the case. For it would appear that the collective forces favoring the mechanisms of devaluation between peoples who have a traditional and historical enmity are often so powerful as to obliterate, or vastly reduce, the relative importance of individual psychological factors in the maintenance of the hostile relationship.

A final element which favors the externalization and demonization of another people is difficult to categorize. This concerns the role of collective myths of good and evil, which develop over decades and centuries. The myth of the Jews as devils was developed by Christian Europe in the Middle Ages over a period of more than a thousand years and resulted in extensive persecutions. A similar fantasy/myth of cults of unmitigatedly evil witches grew up in the late Middle Ages in central Europe. Its origins may be traced back to ancient times. Volkan discusses some of the pagan and monotheistic elements in the history of the Greek and Turkish peoples on Cyprus which may have favored the mythic demonization of these peoples by each other. Historical myths which are adhered to explicitly, or remain latent within a society, furnish at the same time both a repository of primitive hostility and a collective sanction for externalization which has the coherent authority of history and the apparent sanction of God. They exert a power- ful regressive influence on the minds of a people.

5. The egoism of victimization. It is remarkable how little empathy is felt by national groups for the suffering of their traditional enemies, even if the victimization on the other side is palpably evident and comparable to or greater than one's own. Certainly there are exceptions, but these stand out poignantly and are sometimes recorded because they are so noteworthy, or are ennobled in works of literature. The lack of empathy, the inability to identify with the anguish experienced by the members of a national group toward whom one bears hostile feelings, removes one of the central deterrents to the waging of war.

Not all of the reasons for this lack of empathy are well understood. Certainly the feeling of justification for hatred because of past grievances buttresses the hostility among individuals within the group and for the group collectively. The experience of traumatization has an additional effect which I would call the egoism of victimization. This is the tendency, which severe hurt and grief seem inevitably to bring about, to direct all investment, all empathy and love, toward those of one's immediate circle of fellow sufferers, defined generally in no broader terms than oneself and one's own afflicted people. Conversely any investment of caring in the other side is withdrawn. There is, as Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have noted in their study of postwar Germany, "an isolated regret for only one's own losses. )S The value of one's own group is thus enhanced; the value of the other is reduced. The egoism of victimization thus has two fundamental interrelated aspects: the justification of continuing hostility on the grounds of having been victimized by the other, and the narcissistic focusing of empathy upon one's own people with the consequent inability to identify with the suffering of the other group.

Fear that one's people will once more be attacked by the other, will once again become victims, perpetuates a hostile vigilance and an unwillingness to take risks. " It is for this reason that intervention of third-party groups, whose members are able to appreciate the ambiguities of the situation and the humanity and worth on both sides, may be essential if the cycle of repeated wars between two ethnic groups caught in a web of hostility is to be interrupted. Third-party nations may, of course, exploit the conflict for their own national purposes, a phenomenon which is readily observed in many parts of the world today.

6. War as Therapy. Churchill's famous remark that there is nothing so exhilarating as to be fired upon without result captures the hearty enthusiasm with which men may engage in war despite all the horrors which they bring about. "The only time members of my family have ever been happy, brave, successful, was in time of war," declares the contemporary southern grail-seeker in Walker Percy's novel, Lancelot." Dr. Volkan provides a detailed discussion of the curative value which the 1974 war had for the Turks on Cyprus, and he also reviews similar phenomena in the literature dealing with the psychology of warfare. War converts passivity and victimization into aggression and mastery. Worthless losers become glorious victors. Group purpose, a higher sense of one's collective and national cohesion, is achieved. The war leader becomes elevated as a symbolic national hero (Ecevit, for example). There are indeed few national heroes who are not war heroes. The Egyptian newspapers heralded the 1973 Arab-Israeli war as a great victory, although it was a bloody affair that was in reality a tragedy for both peoples. When I was in Egypt in January 1978, our group was told that the 1973 war was a political success for Egypt as it restored the sense of national self-regard that had been so damaged in previous wars against Israel. There is much still to be learned of the purgative value of war, and of the relationship between success or failure in battle and the self-esteem of individuals and nations.

7. Aggression and the inability to mourn. As noted earlier the self-esteem of individuals is deeply affected by identification with the valued, cohesive entity of a nation-group and its collective purposes. Such elevation of self-worth is particularly intense if the nation is led by a charismatic leader who is seen as embodying in his words and deeds the most cherished values of the people and their country. The nation's military victories, as well as its defeats, inevitably create losses which must be mourned.

As Dr. Volkan writes of so movingly in this book, the losses with which the survivors of war must contend are not only of one's own people. The evidences of the enemy dead or vanquished must be confronted as well. The Turkish victors in northern Cyprus were faced with the inescapable physical evidence of the Greeks who had been killed in the 1974 war or had been forced to abandon their homes and places of work. Some mourning by the Turkish population for these victims among their enemies seems to have occurred in the three years following the war, which may bode well for future relations between these peoples. For mourning requires the acknowledgment of the humanness of the enemy, the realization that he possesses some worth. It means an assumption of responsibility for the painful fact that whether the acts of aggression were justified or not, other people have been destroyed or injured as a result of one's own aggression.

But there are instances---perhaps this is the commoner situation---where little or no mourning for the victims of one's own people's aggression against another ethnic group can take place. This is likely to be the case where the aggressions committed have been so barbaric that to take responsibility for them would deeply damage a nation's view of itself, would be so shattering to the nation's self-regard as to produce a collective melancholia. Such has been the case in postwar Germany, as discussed by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in their book The Inability to Mourn. Mourning for the victims among one's enemies is also defended against when a situation of continuing hostility and fear of attack persists and perpetuates distrust. The mobilization of self-justifying mechanisms is then employed to devalue the purposes and humanity of the other side.

I shall conclude with a word about the challenges and pitfalls that face investigators who undertake to write of the psychological dimensions of international conflict, indeed who choose to work in virtually any aspect of this field. There is to begin with the difficult methodological problem of finding a sound conceptual balance among the relevant insights of individual and group psychology in a field where realities are multilayered and compelling. But beyond this there are profound personal issues which are raised for the psychiatrist or psychologist who involves himself in the field of international relations.

He or she is not likely to become meaningfully involved unless there is some affinity with one or more of the ethnic groups involved in the conflict, unless the conflict matters personally at some level. Indeed membership in (or immediate descent from) one of the groups can facilitate an understanding of the psychology of that group and of its history and culture which it is not possible for someone outside of the culture to duplicate.

Searching challenges to one's personal identity are inevitably encountered in doing this work. "Who are you?" and "where do you stand?" are questions frequently encountered from those one meets in the course of an investigation in a foreign culture. These questions become much more than the cliches they often can be in a social or even a clinical context. Profound questions arise concerning the legitimacy of one's motives for being "involved." Old uncertainties about one's origins and historical being are evoked that invite a great deal of personal self-examination or reexamination. Too deep an identification with the sufferings and national- istic aspirations of one party in a conflict may make it extremely difficult for the psychologist to retain the objectivity and detachment necessary for this work. The investigator becomes in some sense like the German sociologist George Simmel's "stranger," the marginal man, "at once near and remote, both at home and ill at ease in 'his' community," hence possessing "that rare quality, objectivity, a quality that those who really belong in a group are too deeply engaged to develop."* It is certainly advantageous for the investigator who is a member or descendant of one of the protagonists to have achieved some distance from the conflict, to have lived for sufficient time in another culture to have obtained considerable objectivity and perspective.

Dr. Volkan, as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Turkish-Cypriot origins, who has lived and worked in the United States since 1957, is ideally suited for this work. Yet Dr. Volkan describes candidly in this book the profound questions of personal identity which he had to confront in the course of his investigations. I shall not anticipate for the reader what he tells of so candidly in the pages that follow. Dr. Volkan writes of the kinds of struggles that any investigator must confront who exposes himself to the psychological forces that dominate the conflicts between ethnic groups.

Finally, there is a problem, which may be unique to the psychology of political conflict, especially of international conflict, that deserves to be mentioned. One is dealing here with critical matters that involve the lives of great numbers of people. The psychologist's role, however modest -- and it is vital that he recognize the limits of that role -- may expose him to issues of great moment. He may, as was necessary for Dr. Volkan in this work, to have discussions with world leaders or other decision makers. This type of activity can easily threaten the balance or orientation of the investigator, who may be unaccustomed in his usual clinical or administrative work to functioning in the midst of such heady matters. Personal psychoanalysis or other efforts at deep self-knowledge do not generally provide by themselves sufficient awareness or mastery of the areas of narcissism or unconscious grandiosity which may be stimulated by work in the field of international relations. Dr. Volkan's evident grace, the tact and humility with which he moves from a discussion of meetings with Cypriot and Turkish leaders to a detached application of psychoanalytic theoretical concepts, makes this exacting work seem much easier than it really is. I know of no clinical work in which the injunction to know one-self is so compelling.

U.N. document on ethnic conflict