Psychoanalysis, International Relations, and Diplomacy

A Sourcebook on Large-Group Psychology

Vamik D. Volkan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367102654
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917875
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The author has three goals in writing this book. The first is to explore large-group identity such as ethnic identity, diplomacy, political propaganda, terrorism and the role of leaders in international affairs. The second goal is to describe societal and political responses to trauma at the hands of the Other, large-group mourning, and the appearance of the history of ancestors and its consequences. The third goal is to expand theories of large-group psychology in its own right and define concepts illustrating what happens when tens of thousands or millions of people share similar psychological journeys. The author is a psychoanalyst who has been involved in unofficial diplomacy for thirty-five years. His interdisciplinary team has brought "enemy" representatives, such as Israelis and Arabs, Russians and Estonians, Georgians and South Ossetians, together for dialogue. He has spent time in refugee camps and met many world leaders.

CHAPTER ONE

Diplomats and psychoanalysts

Starting with Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysts have sought to venture beyond the couch and apply their expertise to interconnected aspects of human behaviour and the external world. But given the pervasive influence realpolitik has had over government and the study of international relations, and some inherent difficulties within the field of psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that political science and psychoanalysis still remain distant cousins.

The concept of realpolitik was first introduced by Ludwig von Rochau in his Grundsätze der Realpolitik (1853). He advised politicians to estimate carefully what the opposition really wanted, not what they said they wanted, and to be prepared to exert force when necessary. Eventually the term came to mean the rational evaluation and realistic assessment of the options available to one’s large group and one’s enemies. In the United States, especially after World War II, this latter interpretation of realpolitik, renamed the “rational actor model,” became prevalent in political analysis. This model (in its various forms) assumes that people make decisions by engaging in a rational calculation of costs and benefits, and that leaders, governments, and nations are rational “actors”. (For various studies of this model, its modifications, and criticism see Etzioni, 1967; George, 1969; Allison, 1971; Janis & Mann, 1977; Barner-Barry & Rosenwein, 1985; Jervis, Lebow & Stein, 1985; Achen & Snidal, 1989.)

The so-called “deterrence” theories characteristic of the Cold War era depended on this type of rational approach, and many political scholars believe that decisions made according to rational actor models prevented the Soviets and the Americans from using their nuclear arsenals. This is most likely the case, but policies based on deterrence have also failed, and research in a variety of disciplines demonstrated that decisions were not always predictable based on rational assumptions. For example, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat surprised both Israeli and the United States military intelligence by launching a massive attack across the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973. Based on rational deterrence calculations, policy analysts believed an Egyptian offensive could not be launched before 1975, and so reports on Egyptian troop movements in September 1973 were regarded as merely exercises. As the shortcomings of various rational actor models became evident, some political scientists, and even some government decision-makers and diplomats, began to borrow concepts from cognitive psychology in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explain “faulty” decision making. But they did not look to psychoanalysis for insights.

The application of cognitive psychology nevertheless expanded the scope of analysis of political and international relationships. But the limitations of this approach, which primarily focused on conscious considerations, also became evident. As early as 1977, Janis and Mann, who were considered to be at the forefront of applying cognitive concepts to decision making, were aware of the relevance of unconscious motivations. They suggested a link between disciplines when they noted that, “If the study of unconscious motives that affect decision making is to proceed, it is necessary to take into account other types of research, including psychoanalytic case studies” (p. 98). One of the psychoanalytic cases Janis and Mann studied was Freud’s (1905e [1901]) case of Dora, an eighteen-year-old girl whose “decisional conflict,” to use the terminology of Janis and Mann, concerned whether or not to have an illicit love affair with Mr K, who was married and a friend of Dora’s family. After deciding against the affair, Dora had much postdecisional regret and remained in “post-decisional conflict.” Through their review of Freud’s findings on the unconscious reasons why Dora could not “work through and resolve the post-decisional conflict in a normal fashion” (Janis & Mann, 1977, p. 100), Janis and Mann noted that psychoanalytic insights were in fact needed to fully understand decision making.

While both cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis consider the influence of previous historical events in decision making, the nature of psychoanalytic theory takes into account more than conscious motivational factors and analogous associations; it examines defensive alterations of early experiences, layered personal meanings of events, condensations of unconscious motivations, transference distortions, and the personality organisation of decision makers. The principle of multiple function and over-determination, first described in detail by Waelder in 1930, has to be considered in the evaluation of each decisionmaking process as well as diplomatic and political processes.

Although politicians and diplomats began to broaden their horizons in order to understand “faulty” decision making, and political scientists cautiously explored the relevance of psychology, psychoanalysts themselves did not respond quickly to this opportunity to contribute. Instead, it was two diplomats who indirectly invited psychoanalysts to apply their knowledge of internal psychodynamics to international issues. In 1974, following the division of the island of Cyprus, my homeland, into Turkish and Greek sectors, Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit noted in a public speech the role of psychology in the long-standing conflict between Turkey and Greece. In response to this pertinent observation, I began to study the Cyprus problem, and later with historian Norman Itzkowitz, I studied 1,000 years of Turkish-Greek relations through a psychoanalytic lens (Volkan, 1976; Volkan & Itzkowitz, 1984, 1993–1994).

A few year later, as I have already stated, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat indirectly encouraged psychoanalysts to become involved in the study of international relationships. His speech at the Knesset prompted a committee of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to sponsor a six-year project (1979–1986) that brought together teams of influential Egyptians, Israelis, and Palestinians for a series of unofficial dialogues. The American team, serving as neutral facilitators, consisted of psychoanalysts (including myself), psychiatrists, psychologists, and former diplomats. The Israeli and Arab groups also included psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, but were mostly comprised of influential citizens—ambassadors, a former high-level military officer, journalists, and others—attending the meetings in an unofficial capacity.

Three years later, inspired by my involvement in international and interdisciplinary projects, and encouraged by the writings of Mitscherlich (1971) who urged psychoanalysts to move beyond their clinical offices and become part of interdisciplinary work on societal and political issues, I founded the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at the University of Virginia. The faculty of the centre included psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, former diplomats, political scientists, historians, and others from both social and behavioural sciences. We conducted unofficial dialogues with Soviet psychologists and diplomats during the two years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and later worked in locations such as the Baltic Republics, Georgia, Kuwait, Albania, Slovakia, Turkey, Croatia, Germany, the United States, among other places. As far as I know, this centre, which closed three years after my retirement in 2002, was the only organisation that specialised in directly applying psychoanalytic concepts to ethnonational conflicts, post-war adjustments, and facilitation of inter-large-group dialogues to encourage democracy and peaceful coexistence (Volkan, 1988, 1997, 2004, 2006a, 2013).

There were certainly others—our contemporaries and those who preceded us—who made significant contributions to interdisciplinary work and examined history, politics, and social movement and relationships through a psychoanalytic lens. As far back as the 1930s political scientist Harold Lasswell, following trips to Europe and study of psychoanalytic theories, became a voice introducing psychodynamic factors and the role of unconscious issues in political science and politics (Lasswell, 1932, 1936, 1948, 1963). Some psychoanalysts, too, following Freud, also applied psychoanalytic findings to social and political topics including political propaganda (see, for example, Money-Kyrle, 1941; Kris, 1943–1944; Glower, 1947; Fornari, 1966). Notably, in the 1960s with the works of psychoanalysts such as Niederland (1961, 1968) and Krystal (1968), many psychoanalysts began to study the impact of the Holocaust on its survivors and then on the generations to follow. Some of these studies included psychological examination of societal involvement of perpetrators and societal responses to massive trauma (Mitscherlich & Mitscherlich, 1975). References to such papers are too numerous to include here. However, in our book The Third Reich in the Unconscious (Volkan, Ast & Greer, 2002) my co-authors and I included many such references (also see: Grubrich-Simitis, 1979; Kogan, 1995; Kestenberg & Brenner, 1996; Laub & Podell, 1997; Brenner, 2001, 2004).

There were other psychoanalysts who made contributions to political and societal issues as well: Moses (1982) examined the Arab-Israeli conflict from a psychoanalytic point of view. Šebek (1992, 1994) studied societal responses to living under communism in Europe. Loewenberg (1995) went back to the history of the Weimar Republic and emphasised its humiliation and economic collapse as major factors in creating shared personality characteristics among the German youth and their embrace of Nazi ideology. Kakar (1996) described the effects of Hindu-Muslim religious conflict in Hyderabad, India. Apprey (1993, 1998) focused on the influence of transgenerational transmission of trauma on African Americans and their culture, while Adams (1996) warned us not to ignore race and colour in psychoanalysis. Hollander (1997) explored events in South America. In addition, Afaf Mahfouz from Bethesda, Maryland and Vivian Pender from New York, New York played key roles in promoting links between psychoanalysts and the UN. Similarly, in 1998 South American psychoanalysts organised a large and successful meeting in Lima, Peru that brought psychoanalysts together with high-level diplomats and politicians. The list goes on.

After 11 September 2001 psychoanalysts were highly motivated to study trauma at the hand of the Other. The International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) formed the Terror and Terrorism Study Group chaired by Norwegian analyst Sverre Varvin that lasted for several years (Varvin & Volkan, 2003) and established a committee in the United Nations. The theme of the 44th Annual Meeting of the IPA in Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 2005 was “trauma”, including trauma due to historical events. Hollander (2010) examined psychopolitical aspects of the United States after 11 September 2001. Meanwhile, Elliott, Bishop and Stokes (2004) and Lord Alderdice (2007, 2010) wrote about the situation in Northern Ireland, and Roland (2011) described in great detail the continuing influence the India-Pakistan partition had on the populations there. Erlich (2010, 2013) examined the concept of enemy, wounded societies, prejudice and paranoia in large groups, and the terrorist mind. Böhm and Kaplan (2011) explored the concept of revenge, and Fromm (2012) reviewed transgenerational transmissions. In 2011 during her plenary lecture at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Winter Meeting in New York, outgoing president Prudence Gourguechon urged the members of the association to show their faces in areas already in the public eye. She stated that if psychoanalysts do not explain the causality of disturbing events and provide professional information about human behaviour, statements by others with less knowledge on such matters will prevail.

Nevertheless, collaboration between psychoanalysis and politics or diplomacy remained, and still remains, limited. It has proven difficult to define specific areas where cooperation between these disciplines can occur in useful and mutually satisfying ways. One reason stems from psychoanalytic traditions and previous attempts to apply psychoanalysis to other areas. Starting with Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysts have written on a variety of topics relating to the diplomatic and political realms, but their contributions have thus far been mostly theoretical in nature, and of little practical use to diplomats and politicians. Psychoanalysts have studied group psychology, political leaders, and their relationships with followers, political propaganda, mass violence and war. They have developed theories on the aggressive drive as the root cause of war, the perception of a state or nation as a mother, groups who respond to a leader as to a father, and identification of group members with one another. Frequently and unfortunately, they applied psychodynamic observations of small groups, such as therapy groups composed of six to twelve individuals or organisations with members in the hundreds, to the psychodynamics of large groups composed of tens, hundreds of thousands, or millions of individuals. Few theorists accounted for differences between the processes that occur in a stable large group and those that occur when a large group is regressed, or whether or not a large group is preoccupied with a neighbouring group.

Freud’s (1921c) theory on group psychology, which reflects an oedipal theme, is well known. But we also must remember that Freud, as Waelder (1971) stated, was only speaking of regressed groups, and his theory does not provide a full explanation of large-group psychology. Nevertheless, Freud’s theory of group psychology should not be fully abandoned. The behaviour he described can be seen in regressed groups today: the members of the group sublimate their aggression against the leader in a way that is similar to the process of a son turning his negative feelings towards his oedipal father into loyalty. In turn, the members of a group idealise the leader, identify with each other, and rally around the leader.

Some international events illustrate Freud’s ideas in concrete fashion. In 1998 tension between the US and Iraq increased over the issue of inspection of some of Saddam Hussein’s numerous presidential “palaces” in which illegal weapons were reportedly being manufactured. Some Iraqis responded to the increased tension and possible US military action by creating a “human shield” around his palaces and other important sites. These individuals were literally rallying around a leader. Although autocratic persuasion and propaganda certainly played a role in their response, many reputable policy analysts believed that a majority of these Iraqis acted voluntarily. In 2013 we also see literal rallying around a leader in isolated and regressed North Korea.

Given shortcomings in Freud’s ideas on group psychology, in the 1970s and 1980s some psychoanalysts have shifted their approach on large groups from emphasising the leader as an idealised father, to the mental representation of a large group as an idealised and nurturing mother. For example, Anzieu (1971, 1984), Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984), and Kernberg (1980, 1989) wrote on regressed groups and its members’ shared fantasies in which the large group represents an idealised, all-gratifying early mother (“breast-mother”) that repairs all narcissistic lesions. The members of such regressed large groups, according to Anzieu and Chasseguet-Smirgel, will choose leaders who promote such illusions of gratification, and the large group may become violent and try to destroy external reality that it perceives as interfering with this illusion. Thus, there seemed to be among some psychoanalysts a growing emphasis on pre-oedipal rather than oedipal issues on this subject. Kernberg stated that Freud’s description of libidinal ties among the members of a group in fact reflects a defence against pre-oedipal conditions.

The above formulations basically represent individuals’ perceptions of large groups and political leaders, and therefore remain theoretical constructs that political scientists or diplomats find difficult to use in their own examination of day-to-day events or important international incidents. These formulations do not reflect a large-group psychology in its own right. What does this mean? There are echoes of individual psychology in large-group psychology shared by tens, hundreds of thousands, or millions of persons, but we recognise that a large group is not the same as a single, standalone person. Yet multitudes of people in a large group do share a psychological journey, such as complicated mourning after major shared losses at the hand of the Other, or when they use the same psychological mechanism such as “externalisation” of unwanted images that makes the Other a shared target. These journeys become sustained social, cultural, political, or ideological processes that are specific for the large group under study. Considering large-group psychology in its own right means making formulations as to a large group’s conscious and unconscious shared psychological experiences and motivations that initiate specific social, cultural, political, or ideological processes, processes that influence this large group’s internal and external affairs. We recognise this same process of evaluation in psychoanalysts’ clinical practices when they make formulations about the internal worlds of their patients in order to summarise diagnoses and treatments.

In large-group psychology I noted that shared social, cultural, political, or ideological processes are primarily in the service of protecting the narcissistic investment in what is commonly known as the large-group identity, such as an ethnic or religious identity, and its integrity. Leader-follower interactions comprise only one element of this effort. Wars, war-like situations, terrorism, diplomatic efforts, and shared losses and gains associated with shared mourning or elation are all carried out in the name of large-group identity, an abstract concept. This is true even though this psychological source is usually hidden behind rational real-world considerations—economic, legal, or political.

We observe various types of narcissistic investment in large-group identity. A healthy degree of narcissistic investment in a large-group identity provides a sense of belonging and trans-generational continuity among members, and in turn supports their individualised self-esteem. An “exaggerated large-group narcissism” denotes a process in which people in a given large group become preoccupied with the superiority of almost anything connected with their large-group identity, ranging from nursery rhymes and food, to established cultural customs, artistic achievements, scientific discoveries, past historical triumphs, and possession of more powerful weapons than their neighbours, even when such perceptions and beliefs may not be realistic. A particularly pernicious form of “malignant large-group narcissism” is observable when members of one large group share a spoken or unspoken belief that “inferior others” are contaminating their group’s superiority, and they feel entitled to use shared sadism in order to oppress or kill them. What happened in Nazi Germany illustrates this concept. There are even large groups that exhibit “masochistic large-group narcissism”. For example, the members may hold on to a sense of victimisation for decades or even centuries after a massive trauma at the hand of the Other, often in the service of feeling morally superior, openly or in a hidden fashion.

My efforts to develop a large-group psychology in its own right and to study the crucial role of large-group identity in this psychology began with my participation in small meetings in which Israeli and Arab representatives were brought together. I noted that besides speaking about their own individual identities, expectations and anxieties, and besides the evidence of small-group dynamics such as those described by Bion (1961), participants from antagonistic groups became spokespersons for the large groups to which they belonged. All participants in the dialogue, regardless of their personality organisation, professional or social standing, or political orientation, felt that their side was under personal attack and were compelled to defend the narcissism invested in their large group. Since individuals seemed determined to protect their large group’s identity, I came to believe that large-group identity needed to be studied more fully. I concluded that understanding how a large group’s identity develops, how it has to be protected, especially under stress, how large groups will tolerate sadism or masochism, or feel entitled to make others suffer or even suffer themselves in order to maintain their large-group identity, are crucial issues of large-group psychology in its own right. In the next chapter I will examine large-group identity in depth. Now, we will return to Freud’s times.

Writing in 1932, in a letter to Albert Einstein, Freud (1933b) was pessimistic about human nature and the role of psychoanalysis in stopping wars or war-like situations. Although Arlow (1973) also found some cautious optimism in Freud’s later writings on this subject, Freud’s pessimism was mirrored by many of his followers, and this may also have played a role historically in the limited contributions made to diplomacy by psychoanalysts. Having seen what human beings are capable of doing to their fellow humans in many parts of the world over the last three decades, I cannot help but join Freud in his pessimism. Large g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD Psychoanalysis and political conflict: is psychoanalysis relevant?
• ABOUT THIS BOOK
• CHAPTER ONE Diplomats and psychoanalysts
• CHAPTER TWO Large-group identity, shared prejudice, chosen glories, and chosen traumas
• CHAPTER THREE Entitlement ideologies
• CHAPTER FOUR The Crusades, the fall of Constantinople, and the “Megali Idea”
• CHAPTER FIVE Traumatised large groups, societal shifts, and transgenerational transmissions
• CHAPTER SIX Large-group regression and progression
• CHAPTER SEVEN Unending mourning and memorials
• CHAPTER EIGHT Political leaders’ personalities
• CHAPTER NINE Reactivation of a chosen trauma
• CHAPTER TEN Intertwining old “memories” and affects with current ones
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Political propaganda, suicide bombers, and terrorism
• CHAPTER TWELVE “Unofficial” diplomacy and psychoanalytic large-group psychology
• REFERENCES
• INDEX