Blind Trust

"This is another book by a retired professor of psychiatry, this time from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Like me, Vamik Volkan came originally from a divided island. He was born in northern Cyprus and he experienced the partition of the island and the violence of the time. He is Turkish and a Muslim by background. As a young man he went to the United States and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst working with individual people, particularly people who were psychotic. Because of his background he began to think to himself: ‘Haven’t I seen at a group level something similar to what I observe in these individual patients?’ It is the disturbed individual that you deal with in psychiatry, but where a whole community is disturbed by violence as in Cyprus or Northern Ireland the problem may be a group problem. He started by looking at this in Cyprus but moved on to look at it in other parts of the world. He went to Kuwait after the first Gulf War to try to help with post-traumatic stress disorder and how to deal with the widespread incidence there. He began to look at how groups are influenced in a profound way often by distant historic events. Whereas you and I would regard something that happened in the 16th century as interesting but distant, for the community caught up in historic violence it is as though it happened last weekend. Time collapses between the distant past and the here-and-now. Such communities, he says, have ‘chosen traumas’ and more positively what he calls ‘chosen victories’ which have symbolic significance beyond the historical facts. The community leaders also become symbolically important and invested with enormous power in violent communities – which is why he calls the book Blind Trust."