Volkan examines regression, other results of trauma

Dr. Vamik Volkan was in a Tunisian orphanage when he first understood how someone could… Dr. Vamik Volkan was in a Tunisian orphanage when he first understood how someone could become a suicide bomber.

It was 1991, and the place was a converted women’s hospital known as the Home of Steadfastness, located in the arid North African city of Tunis. While there, he observed a particular group of five orphans. He noticed that when they played together, their behavior was not unlike children playing elsewhere.

But when he separated and interviewed them individually, these same children became violently agitated, and even had hallucinations.

On March 27, Volkan visited Pittsburgh to give a lecture, “Societal Regression and Violence: Beyond September 11th,” sponsored by the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Foundation, at the Rodef Shalom Synagogue.

As he told an audience in October 2001, while lecturing on the same topic, “This is when I began to understand how, in some people, individual identity is replaced with large group identity,” he said of the five children. “When together, normal. Separately, they were not.”

According to Volkan, this phenomenon results from the way people around the world deal with trauma inflicted on them by others.

The parents of these five children had been killed during a 1982 massacre in refugee camps in Lebanon, where they had grown up. Because these displaced children were too young to remember their parents or identities, they were all given the surname Arafat, after the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which ran the orphanage.

“This was not a jihad factory where they raised the kids to be suicide bombers,” Volkan said.

Instead, it was a place where these particular individuals had come together to form a new, extreme group identity to help them deal with past shame, humiliation or helplessness. In these five children, Volkan found a microcosm for the emotional condition of people around the world who join groups for which they become willing to kill themselves and many others.

This psychoanalytical description of suicide bomber evolution may have been difficult for some in the audience in October 2001, because Volkan was giving this particular lecture in New York City, only a month after the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center.

But confronting massive shared traumas, like the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and studying how different groups and societies deal with them is something Volkan has been doing for decades.

After a childhood spent growing up on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where Cypriot Greeks and Turks violently split the nation down political and ethnic lines, he grew up to serve as a consultant on a number of United Nations commissions to areas “traumatized” by violence, such as Israel, Kosovo, Cold War-era Berlin and the former Soviet Union.

As a professor of psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia, Volkan has tried to explore the issues associated with group trauma in several of his published writings, including his most recent book, “Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror.”

As he told the audience in New York, regression occurs when “you go back to utilizing mechanisms that were available to you as a child, and they protect you from plunging into fear.”

In a 2001 article he authored for the center he founded, titled “September 11 and Societal Regression,” Volkan gave the example of a woman he knew, who had been so upset by the attacks in New York that she had “regressed” to eating only macaroni and cheese — something her mother had made for her as a child — for weeks afterward.

In the same article, he asserted that strong leadership in the wake of nationally traumatic events is essential to how a society deals with widespread regressive behavior, including acts more violent than eating macaroni.

When the popularity polls of President George W. Bush dramatically increased in the wake of the attacks, Volkan wrote that this was evidence that Americans were dealing with their own anxieties and fears by “rallying around” a strong symbolic figure of power, reminiscent of a comforting parent.

Leaders in these turbulent periods, according to Volkan, have the ability to shape the emotional direction a population will take by using tactics like exploiting a “chosen” past traumatic event, where a large group of people have been made to all feel shame, humiliation or helplessness, for a variety of psychological purposes.

He pointed to the tactic of comparing the recent trauma of attacks on the World Trade Center to the “chosen” trauma of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as a way to help Americans make sense of the situation.

Alternatively, he also gave the negative example of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic using the ancient cultural humiliation of the Serb defeat by Ottoman Turks in 1389, at the Battle of Kosovo, as a regressive tactic for inspiring violence against Bosnian Muslims more than 600 years later.

According to Volkan, the effects of having no strong leadership to guide a regressed group through the aftermath of a trauma can be disastrous. One example in his writings is the corruption of a marriage tradition in South Ossetia, a region in the Eastern European country of Georgia.

For generations, the ritual of men “kidnapping” a potential spouse in order to marry her had been an innocuous, if culturally peculiar, act in Ossetian society. But the fall of the Soviet Union and fighting with the Georgian government in the early 1990s triggered a socio-economic collapse, accompanied by a notable power vacuum.

Society, Volkan said, without the moral compass of a strong leader, allowed the once-romantic ritual to become something much darker and more violent, with increasingly younger girls being taken indiscriminately to be raped, rather than married. There was also a resultant explosion in prostitution, violent crime and terrorism.

According to Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Foundation President Sandra Kryder, Volkan’s psychological examination of what creates a terrorist was one of the reasons behind the organization bringing him to speak.

“This is an opportunity for people to explore things like the topic of the ‘terrorist mentality,’ and what causes people to be drawn to behaviors that hurt so many people,” she said.