Papers

Large-Group Identity: Border Psychology and Related Societal Processes

Vamik D. Volkan

Vamik D. Volkan, M.D. is the founder of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) and Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry in the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine. He is also a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D.C. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the German Psychoanalytic Association annual meeting May 10, 2002, in Leipzig, Germany.

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Introduction

A few months after the reunification of Germany, I visited a friend who lived in a town on the west side of the former East German/West German border. He asked if I would like to see the former border and then drove us to a grassy area not far from Göttingen that, prior to 1990, had been on the boundary between the two German states. My friend described how the trees had been cut down to aid the border guards in apprehending defectors. That day, of course, there were no soldiers, and the watchtowers were empty. I was, however, struck by the eerie silence of the place, and also by the way that my friend was whispering. It was as though there was still danger in this former border region. We then drove across the old border and into former East Germany, something my friend had not done since before Germany’s division. Though they had been reunited, the physical disparities between the two former countries were immediately obvious: the roads were poorly maintained and designed and even the shape of the electric poles was different. It was indisputable that we were now in a different “country.”

As we rode through the countryside, leaving heavy traffic behind, my friend took a deep breath and then asked me if I smelled something foul. I could not detect anything out of the ordinary, and told him so, but he did not accept my answer. He pointed to a car that was quite a distance in front of us and said: “You see that car? It’s communist-made. Those cars smell.” I was certain he could not have realistically sensed anything emanating from the car because it was too far away. It seemed that since he “knew” communist-made cars had an offensive odor, his senses played a trick on him. Seeing the car stimulated his smelling the car. As a psychoanalyst, I also came to another conclusion: My friend was externalizing and projecting some unacceptable elements of his own onto East Germans. He was “clean;” East Germans “stunk.” I did not verbalize my deduction but sensed that my friend, also a psychoanalyst, had come to a similar conclusion about his experience. He seemed embarrassed and quickly changed the topic of conversation.

Soon after this incident, my colleagues and I at the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI)—an interdisciplinary group of clinicians, scholars, and diplomats which I directed from 1988 to 2002—attempted to study the “psychology of borders” as it pertained to German reunification. We knew from our collective experience (Volkan, 1997, 1999a) in investigating border areas that there would be a psychological reaction to the removal of the political boundary between East and West Germany and an increased effort to examine the “new” German identity.

Before returning to our study concerning the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I will define large-group (i.e. ethnic, national, religious, ideological) identity and show how a physical border acts as a psychological skin around large-group identities. My aim in this paper is to examine, through a psychoanalytic lens, societal processes that accompany changes in political borders and to suggest a method to keep such processes from becoming malignant.

This issue is also particularly relevant to Cyprus where the question has been what to do about the physical, political, and psychological border between the two communities on the island.

Large-group identity

Erik Erikson (1956) characterized a person’s “ego identity,” which I call a “core identity,” as “a sustained feeling of inner sameness within oneself...[and] a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others” (p. 57). Following Erikson’s description of individual core identity, I identify large-group identity as the subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are connected by a persistent sense of similitude, even though they also share characteristics with individuals outside their large group. Though there are phenomenological differences between the various types of large groups since they may be focused on ethnic, religious, national, or ideological concerns, I will focus here on the psychodynamic factors common to all of them.

When Sigmund Freud (1921) imparted his theory of large-group psychology, he did not emphasize the importance of group identity, nor did he substantially use the term “identity” in this essay or elsewhere in reference to either individuals or groups. Instead, his theory concerning large groups was based on his observation that large-group dynamics paralleled those seen during an individual’s oedipal phase. Freud also dealt primarily with leader-follower interactions, from which he concluded that any hostility between a member of a large group and its leader had to be transformed by other members into a type of loyalty to the leader. According to Freud, just as a son identifies with his father once the oedipal conflict has been resolved, the group member identifies with the leader, who is idealized. The members of the group are then connected to one another through their devotion to the leader. Today we know that this kind of situation occurs only in regressed large groups (Waelder, 1971). Following Freud, psychoanalysts continued to write about large groups from the perspective of what the group means to the individual.

Through nearly three decades of working in locations where large groups are in conflict (Volkan, 1979b, 1988, 1997, 1999a) and listening to traumatized people and political leaders, I have shifted the study of large-group psychology from a focus on individuals’ perceptions of the meaning of their large group (i.e. emphasis on the group being experienced as a nurturing mother) to the structure of large-group psychology in its own right. When I think of the classical Freudian theory of large groups, I visualize people arranged around a gigantic maypole, which represents the group leader. Individuals in the large group dance around the pole/leader, identifying with each other and idealizing and supporting the leader. I have expanded this metaphor by imagining a canvas extending from the pole over the people, forming a kind of tent. This canvas represents the large-group identity. In the revised metaphor, the people still surround the pole/leader and support it, determined to keep it upright, but their underlying concern is to keep the canvas taut so it can form a protective cover over them. As a canvas is a vast network of interwoven threads, so is the large-group identity. I have come to the conclusion that essential large-group activities center around maintaining the integrity of the group’s identity, but leader-follower interactions are just one element of this effort.

Seven threads of large-group identity

I have divided the complexity of the large-group “canvas” into seven threads (for more details see Volkan, 1999a, 1999b). In brief, these are the seven aspects of large-group identity that I will discuss in further detail below:

1) Shared identifications

2) Shared suitable “reservoirs” for self and object images associated with positive emotions

3) Absorption of others’ (externalized, projected and displaced) “bad” qualities

4) Absorption of “transforming” leaders’ internal demands

5) Chosen glories

6) Chosen traumas

7) Formation of symbols that may develop their own autonomy (protosymbols)

The first thread: Shared identifications

In describing large-group identity, we must first take into consideration children’s identifications with the adults in their environment. Such identifications settle in the child’s core identity and connect the child’s persistent internal sense of similitude (Erikson, 1956) with his or her large-group identity, since, among other things, these identifications reflect parents’ or other caretakers’ interactions with members of the large group to which they all belong. Our psychoanalytic literature has devoted a great deal of energy to understanding how children’s identifications with adults’ language, songs, dances, cultural preferences, and mythology, for example, connect children to their ethnic, national, or religious identities and are, in this sense, shared identifications; therefore, while this component is crucial to the evolution of large-group identity, I will not dwell on it here.

It is important, however, to mention the factors that may be involved in children’s selection of these shared identifications. Children’s investment in their large-group identities depends substantially on what identity elements the adults in the large group collectively perceive as most important: ethnicity (“I am an Arab”), religion (“I am a Catholic”), nationality (“I am a German”), or a combination of these. It is important to recall that, as a large-group organizing principle, ideology is less durable than religion, ethnicity, or nationality because it is less basic and more intellectual. A Bulgarian can renounce Communist ideology, but he or she is less able (most likely unable) to stop being Bulgarian.

To illustrate differences in large-group identity investment, consider a child born in Hyderabad, India, for example. This child would be focused primarily on religious and cultural issues as he or she develops a large-group identity, since adults there define their dominant large-group identities according to religious affiliation—Muslim or Hindu (Kakar, 1996). On the other hand, a child born in Cyprus would absorb a dominant large-group identity defined by ethnonational sentiments, because the current decisive identification is whether one is Greek or Turkish, not whether one is Greek Orthodox Christian or Sunni Muslim (Volkan, 1979b). Though they may become important later in life, questions of investment in ethnicity versus religion, or nationality versus race, are not as essential to understanding large-group identity as is the psychodynamic process of linking the child’s core identity to the large-group identity that is historically primary at the time of the child’s development.

As a result of certain circumstances, such as having parents who belong to different races, religions, or nationalities, a child may come to identify with more than one ethnic, national, or religious group (Jacobson, 1964). In my own work in Transylvania in 1993 and South Ossetia in 1998, interviews with individuals born to “mixed marriages” (Romanian and Hungarian in the former case, South Ossetian and Georgian in the latter) revealed that identity difficulties were especially acute when drastic sociopolitical changes occurred or when wars broke out between the groups.

While the concept of identification is familiar to psychoanalysis, other components of large-group identity that have come to my attention through my involvement in international relations are perhaps less familiar. I will thus spend more time describing and discussing them.

The second thread: Suitable reservoirs

What I have designated “suitable reservoirs” of externalized childhood self (or object) images constitute the second component of large-group identity (Volkan, 1988, 1999a, 1999b). Suitable reservoirs are culturally accepted items—such as a Finnish sauna, a Scottish kilt, or German nursery rhymes—that absorb children’s libidinally invested externalized self or object images as well as projections of pleasing feelings or thoughts. Under the influence of adults in a particular large group, children of this group utilize the same reservoirs and, without being aware of it, develop an invisible network of “we-ness.”

In order to further explain the concept of suitable reservoirs, I will turn to a child around 36 months old who is completing, for all practical purposes, the development of a cohesive self-representation (Jacobson, 1964; Mahler, 1968; Kernberg, 1970, 1976; Volkan, 1976, 1987) by integrating his or her libidinally determined “good” self images with aggressively determined “bad” self images. (Of course, the child also does the same thing with object images.) This process is an important milestone in an individual’s life. Developing a cohesive self-representation, however, is by no means entirely completed in childhood, or even during one’s lifetime. Some images of the self (and internalized objects), both “good” and “bad,” remain unintegrated, especially at this early age. Because these unintegrated images threaten to destabilize the child’s established self-representation and his or her subjective experience of it as a core identity, they must be addressed. Failing to do so causes object-relations conflicts as well as disturbances in the child’s sense of personal identity. Thus, the individual tries different methods of dealing with unintegrated self (and object) images and the emotions attached to them.

One of these methods, a major one in childhood, is to externalize unintegrated self (and object) images into suitable reservoirs. Here I use the term “externalization” in the manner of Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly (1970): a primitive form of projection that deals with outwardly transporting self and object images. I use the term projection only when the process is connected with thoughts, perceptions, and affects. An example of externalization, as illustrated by Novick and Kelly, would be a child falling down and saying, “I did not fall down; it was my doll.” In this example, the child’s unintegrated, humiliated—and then perceived as “bad”—image is externalized onto the doll. This externalization would, most likely, be temporary. In a different case, however, a child’s uncle may become a reservoir to receive the child’s unintegrated “good” images. In this situation, the relative, rather than the child him- or herself, will become idealized. Later in life the child may reinternalize and integrate some of what was externalized onto the uncle and develop a more realistic view of him, but this externalization may be used for a long period of time.

The special significance a child places on a person or thing that contains unintegrated “good” parts of the self and previously internalized object images does not necessarily create a bond with the child’s large group or contribute to the establishment of large-group identity. This observation is similar to the recognition that not all early identifications create a sense of belonging to a large group. When a girl is learning certain mothering functions through an identification with a nurturing mother’s functions, for example, this does not connect the girl to her ethnic identity. It is when the mother behaves as an extension of her large group that the child’s identification with the mother will connect the child’s sense of identity with her sense of large-group identity. The externalization of unintegrated “good” images can simply remain part of the personal developmental experience, take many forms, and may frequently change. A special doll, ethnic food or song, or a cherished relative, for example, may be replaced by something else onto which the child externalizes unintegrated aspects of the self. Alternatively, the individual may preserve a particular item as a keepsake for many years, continue to feel “good” throughout his or her life when consuming ethnic food, or evolve a lifelong special relationship with a relative. There are conditions, however, in which externalization of “good” unintegrated self (and object) images initiate, without the child being aware of it, the development of a crucial thread in his or her own large group.

Personal and large-group identity become intertwined when the reservoirs that receive the child’s “good” unintegrated self (and internalized object) images have two characteristics: 1) they are shared by all children in the large group, and 2) they are constant. It is such culturally significant shared reservoirs of externalized images (the sauna or kilt, to return to the earlier examples) that concern us when we deal with ethnic, religious, or national identities. As the child’s mental capacities enlarge, interaction with adult members of the large group in his or her environment—and identifications with their images—help the child form more sophisticated ideas about the group’s shared reservoirs and their role in large-group membership. At the same time, the child projects more positive thoughts and affects into these same suitable reservoirs. The abstract concepts of Finnishness, Scottishness, Jewishness, or Germanness slowly become associated with the suitable reservoirs of externalized images.

As a point of illustration, a Scottish boy becomes aware as he grows up that a kilt or bagpipe represents and is associated with many things: masculinity, clan and national history, specific heroes, battles for independence won and lost, songs and poems, language and dialect, and other specific features of the large-group history. Concurrently, the boy internalizes the many concepts that the reservoir represents and forms an abstract sense of Scottishness; these concepts are now felt or sensed, both consciously and unconsciously, as part of the individual’s core identity. Eventually, a persistent sense of “we-ness” becomes established as something inside the Scot. Still, suitable reservoirs remain as significant external links to the individual’s shared internal sense of similitude with others in their large group, though most of the time the reservoirs revert to a kind of “ordinariness.” Thus, when this Scot is away from home, he may listen to a recording of bagpipe music when he is homesick or when he otherwise feels that his core identity needs “mending,” but he does not necessarily need or want to listen to bagpipe music every day.

Adults in a large group also direct the children to externalize their aggressively determined (“bad”) self or object images and “bad” feelings or thoughts onto suitable reservoirs that belong to the “other,” such as neighboring ethnic, religious, or national groups. In Cyprus, for example, pigs are typical suitable reservoirs that, for Turkish children, belong to the Greek “others.” Because Muslim Turks do not eat pork, they are able to maintain the illusion that what they have externalized and projected onto the pigs will not boomerang and be introjected (eaten) by them. Here, too, external items, animate or inanimate, are used as containers of the child’s “bad” images, which initially helps—externally—to establish the child’s group identity by separating it from other groups’ identities. Again, as the child’s mental capacities become more sophisticated, meanings of suitable reservoirs for “bad” images become internalized as the foundation of the “other” or “enemy” image.

Because they are approved of and protected by the adults in the group, suitable reservoirs become stable containers to receive, hold, and absorb both “good” and “bad” externalizations and projections. Under stressful conditions, such as, for the Palestinians, the occupation of the Gaza Strip, even adults in a group may use tangible objects in a developmentally regressive (externalized) way, or they may establish new suitable reservoirs so as to refortify group bonds. During Israel’s occupation, for example, many adult Palestinians carried small stones painted with the colors of the Palestinian flag in their pockets (where they were hidden from Israeli soldiers). These stones acted as a shared reservoir and kept aspects of Palestinian large-group identity safe by invisibly maintaining it among group members. To reiterate, under ordinary circumstances, adults abstract and internalize large-group identity and render suitable reservoirs to be “ordinary” (like the Scottish kilt for the adult Scot); in the Palestinians’ case, however, the large group collectively perceived a threat, causing a reactivation of the childhood need to use shared reservoirs for externalization, reservoirs that were not experienced as ordinary but were contaminated with “hot” affects.

Summary:
The role of the first two threads

Aspects of children’s early identifications with adults in their large group are included in both their personal core identities and their large-group identity. During the oedipal period, where “superego identifications” take place, children begin to be involved in triadic and then multiple intrapsychic relationships; they start to truly separate their inner connections with individuals within their large group from those with individuals outside the large group. In addition, by using the same “good” or “bad” suitable reservoirs as the rest of the large group to which they belong—beginning at the pre-oedipal phase of life, and, later, at the oedipal and post-oedipal phases—and by abstracting meanings connected with these reservoirs, the child’s personal sense of self becomes linked with his or her experience of large-group identity.

Although the child builds upon these two components of large-group identity in childhood, large-group identity is not crystallized until the adolescent passage. During the “second individuation,” a young person unconsciously reviews his or her attachments to existing identifications (Blos, 1979) and also, as I have shown (Volkan, 1988), to suitable reservoirs. Young people then correspondingly relinquish their investments in some identifications or suitable reservoirs, while increasing them in others. Under the influence of individuals in the large group (especially peers), the youth now unconsciously “decides” which aspects of childhood identifications and suitable reservoirs will become the fixed and permanent means of connecting him or her with individuals in the same large group. A sauna, for example, may remain a tangible item that connects a Finn to all other Finns and a persistent sense of being Finnish. The adolescent’s Finnishness, however, above and beyond the tradition of frequenting a sauna, would also be established as an abstract idealized concept to which the individual and his or her peers would have a shared emotional investment.

After the first and second threads of large-group identity have become interwoven with an individual’s sustained sense of self in adolescence, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to alter the individual’s original sense of “we-ness” associated with his or her large-group identity. Due to external circumstances, exceptions may appear to occur, such as the earlier example I gave of being born into a multiethnic family. Internal circumstances, such as rebellion against one’s parents and, by extension, one’s ethnicity or other large-group concept also may lead the individual away from the idealized abstract concept. But even in these situations, he or she cannot truly escape the fundamental pre-oedipal and later post-oedipal emotional investment in his or her original large-group identity after adolescent passage. The individual can repress or deny the large-group identity and rationalize that he or she now is a citizen of the world, but the crystallized concept of the original large-group identity remains, whether the individual nurtures it or reacts against it.

The third thread:
Absorption of others’ “bad” qualities

As I have described, an individual’s core personal identity is linked to his or her primary large-group identity; neither identity exists in a vacuum. Just as an individual’s identity is at least partly, and perhaps mostly, a product of interaction with other individuals, so does the large-group identity rely on the identity of another large group, usually a neighbor. The third component in large-group identity is a product of the interactions between neighboring group identities.

Like a child who identifies with the way his mother (mostly unconsciously) perceives him (Loewald, 1960), members of a large group weave into the canvas of their shared identity a thread originally placed there by a dominant opposing group. In order to understand this third component, picture two large-group “tents” side by side. Individuals in the first tent throw mud, excrement, and refuse—that is, they externalize their “bad” images of themselves and others and project their own unwanted thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and expectations—onto the “canvas” of the second tent. Note that this action is taken toward the large-group identity itself, the canvas, and not necessarily toward the individuals who possess this group identity. The stain left from the mud, excrement, and refuse is absorbed into the identity of the large group that received it. The “bad” images, thoughts, and affects that are externalized, projected, or displaced by the neighboring large group become a component of the receiver group’s large-group identity.

Consider the following example from 20th-century psychiatric literature in the United States: the widespread delusion of appearing white experienced by African-American patients suffering from psychoses, particularly prior to the civil rights movement (Lind, 1914; Vitols, Walters, and Keeler, 1963). With the modifications of attitudes toward African Americans through their efforts and the efforts of individuals in other large groups, such delusions seem to appear less frequently. In my own work in a segregated African-American mental hospital in the early 1960s, however, I observed that many black patients who expressed the wish to be white simultaneously experienced anxiety about the idea of bearing “white blood.” The whiteness was desirable on one level and dreaded on another, reflecting the fact that, by “wanting” to be like those who denigrated them, African-Americans were both identifying with their oppressors and at the same time feeling anxious about being reservoirs for the “bad” elements to which those oppressors had consigned them, such as “sexual aggressiveness” and “intellectual inferiority.” A psychotic patient, for example, who would show his less-pigmented palms as proof of his “whiteness,” also would experience anxiety about being white. Whatever other reasons might contribute to his anxiety, the anxiety reflected his struggle between his wish to be white and his assimilation of the “mud” thrown at his tent’s canvas, which forced him to remain an “unwanted white” person, a second-class citizen. Maurice Apprey (1993) illustrates how American whites’ perceptions of blacks have been assimilated into the African-American large-group identity experience, for example, how black-on-black crime has become a modified version of the mental representation of white-black historical interactions.

The fourth thread:
Absorption of leader’s internal demands

The fourth component of large-group identity is created by “transforming” or “charismatic” leaders such as Lenin, Ghandi, and Mao. Such leaders bring hundreds of thousands or millions of people out of political isolation and into a new kind of political participation. Sometimes these leaders go a step further: driven to meet the requirements of their own internal worlds, they reshape the external world of their followers and their subjective feelings about their large-group identity.

In these situations, transforming/charismatic leaders symbolically express their own version of the groups’ sentiments—which are connected with the leaders’ own images, wishes, and defenses of childhood—to their followers in the opinions that they express, their public appearances, the speeches that they deliver, their avowed likes and dislikes, and even the way that they dress. It is known, for example, that Yasser Arafat’s head covering symbolically represents the Dome of the Rock and therefore the Palestinian large-group identity. By externalizing their own images connected with their own sense of large-group identity, and projecting and displacing thoughts and affects connected with such identities to their followers, such leaders may raise support for new political ideologies. They may also inflame or tame the existing religious, national, or ethnic (large-group) sentiments, sometimes creating “new” or modified suitable reservoirs for externalization and projection. A simple example from the historical relationship between Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, and the Turkish people illustrates the effect leaders can have on their group members’ subjective feeling of shared sameness.

Until 1925, Turkish men did not wear Western-style hats; hats belonged to “the infidel,” and so were not a suitable reservoir of Turkish “we-ness.” Turkish intellectuals and public servants wore fezzes, and others in both villages and cities wore various types of turban-like headgear. Previously worn in North Africa and by the Greek Christians who inhabited Ottoman-held islands in the Mediterranean, the fez had been introduced in Turkey as a head covering for the Ottoman military in the mid-1820s; in 1829, wearing of the fez was decreed compulsory for all classes of Ottoman officials. As its use spread beyond the government corps, it became a symbol of Ottomanness and, indeed, a universal symbol of Islam. Thus, when Atatürk wanted to establish a new secular Turkish republic, the fez had to be extirpated.

On August 25, 1925, Atatürk traveled to Kastomonu, north of the capital city of Ankara, which had been described to him as one of the most conservative districts in Turkey. When he arrived, he appeared in a suit of grey linen, its cut decidedly Western. He wore a tie and carried a white Panama hat in his hand. As though on signal, all the assembled men shed their Muslim-associated headgear—fezzes, turbans—as Mustafa Kemal stepped into the crowd. By the time Atatürk returned to Ankara nine days later, he had destroyed the fez as an appropriate symbol of Turkishness (Volkan and Itzkowitz, 1984).

The fifth and sixth threads:
Chosen glories and chosen traumas

The next two components included in the large-group identity, “chosen glories” and “chosen traumas,” render each group’s identity clearly “specific” to the particular group. These two elements refer to shared mental representations of historical events and the major historical figures associated with them. It is easy to identify examples of large-group glories of the past being celebrated by adults in a large group, especially during the anniversaries of such events. It also is not difficult to see how children identify with their parents, utilize their own conceptualization of these glories to enhance their sense of self, and at the same time create links with others in the same large group. In order to understand the more complicated process of images of historical trauma also evolving as large-group markers, I will refer to a psychological process called “depositing images or representations” (Volkan, 1987; Volkan, Ast, and Greer, 2002) and differentiate this process from the concept of identification.

The common concept of identification, with which all clinicians are familiar, refers to a subject’s unconscious introjection and assimilation of another person’s self and object images—and the ego functions associated with them—through interactions with that other person. These processes are usually accompanied by incorporative fantasies, such as a person imagining that he or she consumes the object in symbolic ways (as in the earlier example of psychological eating). True identification is only possible after a child separates his or her self-representation from the representation of the other and is no longer in a symbiotic relationship with the other. When identification does occur, after the child separates and individuates (Mahler, 1968), the image that comes from outside modifies, to some degree, the child’s self-representation and therefore also the child’s sense of his or her identity. In the identification process, the child (or later the adult) is an active partner in the interaction.

In contrast, the concept of depositing a representation (Volkan, 1987) emphasizes the role of the object, who unconsciously—and sometimes even consciously—forces aspects of himself or herself, or aspects of his or her own internalized object-images, into the self-representation of the child. By depositing images and representations into the child’s developing (or the regressed adult’s) self-representation, the object influences the child’s sense of identity and gives him or her certain specific tasks to perform. Contrary to identification, the other person can pass his or her images, with associated affects, to the child even before the child achieves an intrapsychic separation between his or her own psychic boundaries and those that belong to the object. In the process of depositing a representation, the active partner is the other person, not the child (or regressed adult) whose self-representation functions as a reservoir.

Consider, for instance, the “replacement child” (Green and Solnit, 1964; Cain and Cain, 1964; Poznanski, 1972; Legg and Sherick, 1976; Volkan and Ast, 1997). Every parent who has lost a child has a mental representation of that deceased child. When another child is born after the death of the first, the child of course has no experience with his or her dead sibling. In relating to their living child, however, some parents unconsciously require the new child to interact with the mental representation of the deceased child that these parents carry internally. Sometimes, the parents may even be partly conscious of what they are doing, naming the second child after the first or voicing certain physical or personality aspects shared by the deceased child and the second child. It is in this sense, then, that a parent “deposits” his or her own internalized object-representation of the deceased child into the developing self-representation of the second child, a process that, again, may start even before the child’s symbiotic phase (Mahler, 1968) is over. Put in place through interactions with the parent, this psychological “deposit” influences or modifies the replacement child’s core identity. At the same time, it manifests itself in tasks that the second child is unconsciously impelled to perform: the child may feel obligated to “resurrect” the lost object so that the parent will be spared his or her complicated mourning and thus be a more nurturing individual for the child.

Likewise, members of a group that has been massively traumatized “deposit” their traumatized images associated with a shared event into the developing selves of their offspring. This process is called “transgenerational transmission” (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). Children in the large group may have different images coming from different traumatized parents, but they share the representation of the same historical event. The mental representation of this event then links thousands or millions of people and it emerges as a thread of the large-group identity, also associated with shared affects.

Large groups also ritualistically recall the mental representation of chosen traumas, and at times current leaders play a role in enhancing them. For example, after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Miloşević, with the help of some academicians and the Serbian Orthodox Church, reactivated the dominant Serbian chosen trauma: the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. I have described the story of this reactivation in detail elsewhere (Volkan, 1997, 1999a) and will report it here only briefly.

In 1989, Miloşević’s people dug up the 600-year-old remains of Prince Lazar, the fallen Serb leader and tragic hero of the battle. The remains were placed in a coffin, and after a year of “travel,” it was reburied at the Kosovo battlefield during the 600th anniversary of the battle. Throughout their year-long journey, Lazar’s remains visited Serbian villages and towns along the way, and at every stop Lazar was, in effect, “reincarnated” and “reburied.” A “time collapse” occurred as well, meaning that feelings and perceptions associated with the mental representation of this historical event were compounded with feelings or perceptions found in the existing “enemy.” Thus, an emotional atmosphere was created to enhance Serbian national identity, and a task of revenge was added to the Serbian identity at that time. This atmosphere was necessary in order for individuals to carry out atrocities against Muslims, this time Bosniak and Kosovar Albanian Muslims, rather than the citizens of the Ottoman Empire, the original nemesis that no longer existed.

The seventh thread:

Protosymbols

In everyday life, certain symbols, such as the red octagonal sign that symbolizes “stop,” function through the force of convention. In psychoanalysis, the symbol functions through different means. When approaching the concept of the symbol, psychoanalysis is most concerned with how and why symbols originate in an individual’s unconscious and function in his or her internal conflicts. Freud (1900), in Interpretation of Dreams and subsequent writings, argued that symbols help to repress unacceptable wishes and ideas and therefore function to reduce anxiety. Following this argument, an individual is aware of the symbol itself but unaware of what it symbolizes. If someone dreams of a snake, for instance, he or she actually sees and remembers an image of a snake but does not consciously perceive the penis that the snake may represent. Initially, psychoanalysts believed that symbols representing body parts, body functions, birth, death, sexuality, and childhood intimate relationships with parents or siblings were universal, included in a kind of phylogenetic memory. This belief “has now been largely replaced by the assumption that the recurrence of such symbols across cultures has to do with the similarity of human beings’ experiences and interests from infancy onward and of the cognitive processes involved in symbol formation” (Moore and Fine, 1990, p. 192).

In considering the function of symbols in large-group identity, we need to focus not on those symbols that signify similarity across many cultures, but on those that are valued in specific ways by only one large group. Large-group symbols tend to be unique; however, when many groups do deploy the same symbol, a star or an animal for example, each tends to attach minor or major differences to it to clearly define the object’s particular significance to that group.

Such a symbol is connected to the identity of a group in that it may stand for all or some of the six threads mentioned earlier, but it may also gain its own autonomy. For example, the image of Prince Lazar was used for centuries by the Serbians as a symbol of their large-group identity in folk songs, religious icons, paintings, sculpture, and other shared cultural forms. It not only became a shared suitable reservoir for Serbian children’s unintegrated “good” images and projected idealizations, but also evoked the Serbian chosen trauma of being defeated, which was transformed into a chosen glory when the Serbs succeeded in battle in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the communist period, the Yugoslavian government officially denigrated Lazar’s image as a “symbol of reactionary nationalism” (Kaplan, 1993, p. 39) in its efforts to integrate Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and others into “brothers and sisters” united under a higher Yugoslavian ideal. But the various ethnic identities remained very much alive, as did the image of Lazar—his name, for example, was affixed to a brand of red wine during the this period (another brand was named after Princess Milica, Lazar’s wife); we might even imagine that, when Serbs in communist Yugoslavia selected this wine to drink, they were unconsciously continuing to introject (through the drinking) and identify with the symbol of Lazar as a national hero.

In many cases, the original significance of a symbol for an ethnic, national, or religious collective is difficult to pinpoint because its meaning develops over centuries and through unconscious, though shared, psychological processes. In other cases, when the large group has been formed more recently, the history of the symbol, such as the Soviet hammer and sickle, may be well-known. What is of interest here is that when a large group is under stress, such as when coexistence or related societal issues are under acute consideration, some of the group’s symbols may become “protosymbols” (Werner and Kaplan, 1963). No longer do they represent what they stand for; now they are what they represent. Protosymbols assume invincible power in uniting members of a society. After September 11, for example, American flags, to a great extent, assumed protosymbolic qualities in the United States.

This overview of large-group identity has described the seven threads that are weaved to produce the cloth, the canvas, of the large-group tent. I have described how threats to large-group identity cause members of the group to become more preoccupied in repairing the wear and tear in the canvas and maintaining their large-group identity. One such threat is the instability of a large group’s political border, as we will see in the next section.

Coexistence, integration, and absorption

In order to discuss the instability or wished-for stability of political borders and what they mentally represent, I have chosen three terms to describe interactions between neighboring large groups—coexistence, integration, and absorption. Before going further, let me clarify that I will use these terms in a descriptive sense to explore the psychodynamics behind different relationships between large groups. These terms are not official diplomatic terms, despite the fact that they sometimes appear in diplomatic language as well as in scholarly political science literature. Politically and diplomatically speaking, when they are used “officially” they mean different things to different parties in negotiations. Other related terms are utilized by diplomats, politicians, and others as well, such as “federation,” “unification,” “conciliation,” and “assimilation.” There are also terms that refer to the “separation” of large groups into different political entities, as in the case of the Czech and Slovak Republics. For the purposes of this paper, I selected three descriptive terms that may be applied to investigate psychoanalytically different types of large-group interactions and the influence of these interactions on large-group identities.

The first term, coexistence, refers to the interactions of two large groups in two types of situations: 1) where the groups live within the same legal state boundary and 2) where the political boundary between the two groups is not clearly or legally defined in the same way by every party and is expected eventually to be clarified. In the second type of situation, one of the groups is a “minority”; it is important to qualify this term in each particular situation since legally and politically there are many different types of minorities.

Integration describes the efforts to bring together previously separated large groups within one legal boundary and reunite them politically while each group maintains its own distinct large-group identity. If the integrated groups also combine their large-group identities, the situation can be described as absorption. Sometimes it is difficult to make clear distinctions between these terms because they may describe various elements of one group-to-group relationship. Different states and regions around the world have their own distinct variations of coexistence, integration, or absorption problems. I will give a few examples with which I am closely familiar.

Israel: Here we see all three concepts mentioned above in operation. Historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg has called Israel a “synthetic” nation (Loewenberg, 1995), referring to the fact that Jews from different cultures and races with different images of history were brought together to create a nation. Although Israel may have been conceived as a monoreligious state, it must be remembered that the Jews it seeks to “absorb” are from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The population of Israel has been deeply impacted by the migration and immigration of people from many parts of the world: pre-Holocaust Zionist settlers, Holocaust survivors and their descendants (generally European), and a more recent wave of immigration that has added almost one million Jews from the former Soviet Union and about 80,000 Ethiopian Jews. It is little wonder that there is a “Ministry of Immigrant Absorption” in the Israeli government. This diversity does not reflect another issue in Israel, however—integration. Israel has one million Arab citizens, the majority of whom are Muslim, as well as significant Christian and Ba’hai communities. Integration issues between the Jewish and Arab citizens have become especially complicated since the beginning of the second intifada (uprising) in the fall of 2000. Finally, there is, of course, also the problem of coexistence concerning Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority, due in large part to the two groups’ ambiguous political borders.

Cyprus: Here the focus is on both coexistence and integration, whether or not in the long run there will be one common government or two separate governments of one sort or another. The two major ethnic groups on the island, Greeks and Turks, have been psychically and physically separated since 1963, with each part having its own “government.” Cyprus is a candidate for membership in the European Union, so there is pressure to find a formula for the two societies to co-exist or integrate, a formula that continues to be elusive.

Germany: Just prior to the reunification of Germany, we might have referred to coexistence issues between East and West Germany. Now that the country has been reunified, however, we must examine issues that fall under the term absorption.

The relationships between particular groups may be characterized at different times as coexistence, integration, and absorption. For further reflections on the psychological and identity implications of German reunification, please see Irene Misselwitz’s paper on pp. 77–86 of this issue.

Psychodynamics of societal coexistence, integration, or absorption

Political and diplomatic efforts to find peaceful coexistence or to promote integration or absorption often provoke shared anxiety (and therefore shared psychological resistances) because they threaten existing large-group identities, despite the fact that at times the population may appear to favor such changes. To understand the roots of this shared group anxiety, I will first examine the anxiety of an individual facing the possibility of modifying or losing his or her identity. This will prepare us to understand better the shared anxiety of large groups facing threats against their identities, especially in situations where borders are unstable.

In our daily lives, we sense that in addition to our large-group identities we have other identities relating to our profession, political conviction, and other attributes. If we look closely, we see that these are not essential to what Erikson (1956) called the “ego identity” and what I call a “core identity.” If a psychiatrist, for example, changes his profession and becomes a book publisher, he may do so without much anxiety unless this change becomes unconsciously connected to an internal danger, such as the loss of a mothering person or her love, castration, or a lowering of one’s self-esteem (Freud, 1926). Likewise, a social democrat can usually become a conservative republican without much internal turmoil. Unlike losing such “sub-identities,” the loss or threat of losing one’s core identity creates extreme anxiety, even terror, in an individual. Of course, these days, in psychiatric clinical practice it is customary to numb the terror of adults on the verge of developing psychosis through extensive use of psychotropic drugs.

In the past, when medication was not available or not used so extensively, we were able to observe more closely adults who were losing or who had just lost their identities, i.e., who were succumbing to schizophrenia. The internal experience, as some of them could verbalize, is like a star bursting into a thousand pieces (Glass, 1989). The accompanying affect is terror. It is because of this terror that the individual creates a new, albeit false, identity. Now he “is” Jesus Christ, or she “becomes” Mother Theresa. After adopting such a false identity, the terror then subsides, but the individual has now broken with reality and become psychotic. Ping-Nie Pao (1979) and I (Volkan, 1995) have written a great deal about this process. In fact, we each stated that, psychodynamically speaking, we could not identify an adult as suffering from schizophrenia (unless the illness had begun in childhood and persisted into adulthood) until the individual lost his or her existing core identity, experienced terror, and then created a false identity.

A person’s sense of large-group identity is linked to his or her core identity. As noted earlier, one reason for this connection is that the core identity includes the individual’s childhood identifications with people in the environment who belong to his or her dominant large group. The individual’s core identity also includes unintegrated aspects of each child’s self and internalized object representations existing in the suitable reservoirs. Thus, when a large-group identity is threatened, such as by an imminent enemy invasion, everyone in the large group feels danger directed not just to the collective large-group identity, but to their individual core identities as well. Thousands or millions of people, most of whom will never know or see each other, thus react to a threat against their large-group identity and join together to create shared responses to such threats. The members of the group combine their efforts to repair, protect, and maintain the threads that make up the canvas of their large-group tent. Political leaders, instinctively and by their defined role in the group, become the focal point for such efforts, which include collective resistance against modifying the existing large-group identity.

This resistance exhibits itself in many distinct ways, but it is generally related to an increased preoccupation with two basic principles that govern the interactions between two neighboring large groups. These two principles are:

1) Two neighboring groups need to maintain their identities as distinct from each other (principle of non-sameness) and

2) Two neighboring groups need to maintain an unambiguous psychological border between them (Volkan, 1997, 1999a, 1999b). If a political border exists, it too becomes highly psychological.

Both principles relate to the fact that people in one large group have a tendency to externalize, project, and displace certain unwanted elements onto the other. As described earlier, “mud” is thrown onto the “other’s” canvas, and it sometimes leaves a “stain.” There is, however, also anxiety that the “mud” could be hurled right back at the sender. The two principles exist to prevent the “mud” from coming back, thus helping each projectors’ identity remain cohesive. The act of emphasizing differences between two groups in conflict can be seen as a way of shoring up the border between the two groups’ identities. This differentiation helps lessen each group’s anxiety, since, with the border in place, a clear distinction between the two groups is maintained, diminishing the anxiety that one group’s identity will become diluted or lost in the other’s.

When two neighboring groups perceive threats against their large-group identities, minor differences between them assume increasing psychological importance (Freud, 1921; Volkan, 1988, 1997, 1999a). Many symbols that mark large-group identities have been involved in accentuating minor differences. For example, the inhabitants of Andhra Pradesh in India often wear scarves around their necks, whereas members of the neighboring group, the Telanganas, do not. Between Croats and Serbs, dialect differences—such as the Croat mlijeko (milk) vs. the Serb mleko—carry a heavy political-cultural load. In times of stress and violent outbreaks, identifying minor differences may have deadly implications. Sinhalese mobs in the Sri Lankan riots of 1958, for example, relied on a variety of subtle indicators—such as the presence of earring holes in the ear or the manner in which a shirt was worn—to identify their enemy Tamils, whom they then attacked or killed (Horowitz, 1985).

We especially see these two principles at work when the two large groups are also separate political entities, such as neighboring states, and are engaged in wars or war-like situations. Shared large-group anxiety also develops when coexistence, integration, and absorption issues surface and become acute. The group then creates “resistances” against such societal and political movements, despite the fact that on the surface it may appear to support them. In such situations, understanding and using the two principles mentioned above may help find ways to promote more genuinely and effectively coexistence, integration, or absorption.

The two principles and coexistence, integration, or absorption

Though the manifestations of a perceived threat to large-group identity will vary in severity depending on the specific political, economic, legal, or military situation, in general, if the goal is to create peaceful coexistence or integration, then ways must be found to maintain both a distinct identity and unambiguous psychological borders (and often by extension unambiguous physical borders), while helping the parties involved become more flexible in dealing with these two principles. For example, in the situation on Cyprus, where the political solution involves peaceful coexistence or integration, we need to make sure that the Turks continue to feel they are “Turks,” without feeling danger to their shared identity, and that the Greeks continue to feel they are “Greeks.” Since there is no such thing as a Cypriot nation or Cypriot ethnicity, both parties’ claims to be “Cypriot” are secondary to their primary ethnic identities (as Greeks or Turks), which should not be threatened. A psychologically informed political strategy should aim to make the psychological border eventually look like Swiss cheese, full of holes, but never completely obliterated. When then Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat made his historic speech to the Israeli parliament on November 20, 1977, he suggested that the psychological wall between Arabs and Israelis should be removed. I do not believe this was sound advice because it neglects to address the need of large groups to maintain psychological boundaries. A political strategy for coexistence or integration should not call for the complete removal of a wall, but for permeability and flexibility in the wall.

In an entirely different political situation, if we consider the situation in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we see that it requires societal absorption. The best way to approach East and West Germans is different from the approach used to encourage coexistence between Arabs and Israelis. During the Cold War, the Berlin Wall stood as the ultimate symbol of the physical as well as psychological border between the East and the West. Donald Winnicott (1969) reminded us that, while this man-made barricade was unsightly and was completely disassociated from “beauty,” without the Berlin Wall, there would have been a war in the 1960s. Winnicott went on to further elucidate the beneficial aspect of the Wall. He argued that a dividing line between opposing forces, at its worst postpones conflict and at its best holds opposing forces away from each other for long periods of time so that people may play and pursue the arts of peace. The arts of peace belong to the temporary success of a dividing line between opposing forces, the lull between times when the wall has ceased to segregate good and bad (Winnicott, 1969, p. 224).

Now that the Berlin Wall no longer exists, the ultimate aim of unified Germany is to completely remove the psychological wall between the former East and West sides. As such attempts are made, however, it should be recognized that the absorption process also initially induces anxiety over losing previous large-group identities and that this anxiety may linger for years. To illustrate this point, I now return to the study conducted by my colleagues and I not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In psychoanalytically examining the interactions between former East and West Germans after reunification, we formed the following hypothesis: As a psychological border, the Berlin Wall, in the years when it was experienced as stable, allowed the societies on either side to effectively externalize, project, and displace their shared unwanted self or object images, thoughts, and affects onto the other side without feeling anxiety that these elements would be returned back to them. Metaphorically speaking, the “smell” of the communist-made car mentioned at the beginning of this paper could never float over to West Germany. It is necessary to clarify that I am not speaking of varying individual experiences here but of shared societal processes in general.

Drastic changes in a society, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, initially prompt elation over the loss of an “enemy,” and in the case of Germany, over the reunion of separated same-blood people. We hypothesized that such elation would be accompanied or followed by the more complicated psychological processes of facing the “boomerang” effect of externalizations, projections, and displacements: Individuals in both halves of the reunited country would have to struggle between a wish to hold onto and a wish to modify their existing large-group identity, and they would have to contend with mourning and adaptation. In short, we believed that if we studied people’s internal experiences about the removal of a physical border (in this case between East and West Germany), we could understand the nature of a psychological border between two large-group identities. We could thus apply this knowledge not only to the case of Germany but to other large-group conflicts, recognizing that the psychodynamics of these relationships can be usefully compared even though the physical and historical realities are of course very different.

We had originally planned to conduct psychoanalytic interviews with more than 100 Germans from both sides of the former border and collect data about their shared, but mostly unconscious, perceptions of the border. These interviews were envisioned to be similar to psychoanalytic diagnostic interviews, with an emphasis on the individual’s experience with the mental images or representations of historical events, i.e., how the images or representations of such occurrences appeared in their free associations, fantasies, and dreams as connected with their personal developmental psychosexual or aggressive issues and object relations.

Note, for example, a dream of Hans, a 25-year-old law student from former East Germany at the time of our study. He had, in actuality, helped his parents build a house on a hill overlooking a lake. In his dream, however, a wealthy man builds a much larger house on the same hill. This man then tells Hans and his family to move out of their newly built home because it obstructs his view of the lake. As a consolation, the wealthy man offers the second floor of his house to the family, and though Hans’ parents quarrel with their “landlord,” the rich man wins in the end. In the dream, the house explodes as soon as Hans and his family move in with the wealthy “landlord.”

Hans’ associations to this dream, apart from those relating to divisions within his childhood family, were to the German reunification. A former East German, Hans knew that the wealthy neighbor in the dream represented West Germany. His experiences with early emotional and physical divisions in his family (between his mother and father and between his mother and grandmother) were condensed in the country’s division between East and West. While the luxury of the rich man’s larger house was appealing to Hans, his old self (his family’s house) in the German Democratic Republic was threatened and disappearing. He spoke of how he was paralyzed for half an hour and felt completely numb on the night of official German reunification. He noted that “the danger was over” because he realized that the threat of a military confrontation was eliminated, “but he was overwhelmed by the anxiety that, with the two sides now united, the ‘bad’ representations symbolized by West Germany would destroy the ‘good’ representations symbolized by East Germany” (Ast, 1991, p. 102).

Another interviewee was Martin, a physicist from West Germany who was 33 at the time of reunification. He was more direct than Hans—his fantasies associated with reunification caused a panic reaction. Martin’s parents had divorced when he was a child, and his father had taken his siblings to another country. Martin did not have many realistic experiences with his father, but his mother told him that his father was “a monster, a brute.” During his teenage years, Martin contemplated joining his father for a while, but he remained in West Germany with his mother, away from the “monster” father. His father’s mental representation was also externalized onto East Germany and the Nazis. Martin had become consciously aware of the meaning of the Holocaust when he was a teenager. He believed that the GDR provided, in a disguised way, more derivatives of National Socialism than existed in West Germany. Thus, he could displace his negative feelings about West Germany onto the country across the border, and there they would be contained. Martin married a Turkish woman living in Germany—in his mind Turks in West Germany were the inheritors of the prejudices previously held against Jews. During the interview, it appeared that his marriage to a Turk helped bolster his wish to avoid becoming a Nazi, a symbolic representation of his “monster father,” and helped convince him that he did not have untamed aggression.

The division between East and West Germany, it seems, was utilized by Martin to keep the mental representations of his parents separate from each other. Therefore, the German reunification implied the return of Nazism to his self-representation, in which his aggression had been denied; Martin’s denial was no longer effective after the reunification. Martin then recalled how it was his mother, with whom he stayed after the departure of his father and siblings, who was openly prejudiced against Jews. During the interview, Martin reported, “The ideas written about Jews in der Stürmer [the Nazi propaganda magazine] are still in her mind [though she was a member of SPD, Social Democratic Party of Germany]” (Ast, 1991, p. 104).

A West German woman, Sabine, in her twenties at the time of reunification also participated in our project. At the time, she was undergoing her personal analysis as part of her psychoanalytic training. The reunification pleased Sabine in some ways, but also instilled the fear that it would “recreate the murderer, the monster [Nazis, Hitler] that perpetuated so many horrors” (Volkan, 1990, p. 3). She, like Martin, projected her thoughts and feelings about the Nazis onto East Germans. Soon after the reunification she had a dream in which she was standing in an open truck. “When I saw the truck I knew it was a picture from the Nazi era, of Jews being deported to Auschwitz. I felt very guilty for coming up with this picture” (Volkan, 1990, p. 3). Since her analyst is Jewish, she developed anxiety about reporting her dream to him. She and her analyst would speak of the Holocaust but could not fully explore this topic to analyze her fantasies and affects related to the Third Reich (For a more detailed account of Sabine’s case, see Volkan, Ast, Greer, 2002).

Our project was unfortunately truncated due to insufficient funds after my colleagues and I had conducted only 25 interviews. The interviews described above and the others, however, afforded us a glimpse at the way in which the mental images or representations of a historical event as significant as German reunification are accompanied by personal and large-group identity issues, emotions, and fantasies. Perhaps most conclusive was that some of these identity issues, emotions, and fantasies seem to be shared by many of the participants. We felt that these interviews supported our initial hypothesis that the German reunification initially induced anxieties and other affects concerning personal and large-group identity issues in both East and West Germans.

Although this project could not be completed, our findings are supported by others who have investigated the psychology of German reunification. These studies have produced similar findings concerning the destabilization of previous externalizations, projections, and displacements and personal or large-group identity concerns. For example, Dieter Ohlmeier (1991) declared that the reunification of Germany was not only a major political change, but was also a major psychological event, prompting a new wave of renegotiations with the Nazi past. Among these renegotiations within German society, according to Rosenthal (1997) and Streeck-Fischer (1999) was the “Nazi skinhead” movement, a maladaptive manifestation of shame and guilt derivations related to the mental representation of the Third Reich. As Ohlmeier (1991) suggests, psychoanalytic considerations of the German reunification evoked “questions of psychology for Germans, and the necessity of a psychohistorical reflection of the Germans since 1933.” When Ohlmeier refers to “a psychology for Germans” I believe he is considering large-group identity issues, which since then have been tackled by many in the German psychological community (See also Opher-Cohn et al., 2000).

The studies by CSMHI and others also have shown that certain images related to the Third Reich and the Holocaust (that individuals did not wish to own) and their associated affects and fantasies had been externalized, projected, and displaced from one side of the border to the other. The destabilization of the “location” of these images, fantasies, and affects probably played a role in the attempts at a “fresh” method for self-examination of the Nazi past and at a “new” German identity.

Since each side used the other for externalization, projection, and displacement purposes during the Cold War, we expected that the push toward absorption would most likely create an urgency to pursue different containers to absorb these externalizations, projections, and displacements. Observations at the time of Germany’s reunification strongly suggest that minority communities within the country began to serve as such “new” containers. Peter Suzuki (1991) collected data concerning the reactions of non-native guest workers to German reunification that clearly indicate that these workers themselves sensed that they had become more suitable for externalization, projections, and displacements of “bad” elements. This was especially true in the former East Germany. Violence against foreign workers took place in all five states that comprise the former GDR. In 1991, Suzuki stated:

The situation in the East has become so grave that Amnesty International has recommended to Bonn to change its policy of automatically resettling in East Germany 20 percent of all refugees and asylum seekers entering Germany, a policy which took effect in December 1990 (p. 93).

Policy-makers, with the help of psychologically informed consultants, need to recognize the likelihood that new “reservoirs” for “bad” images and thoughts will evolve after societal “integrations” or “absorptions” and develop strategies to prevent such processes from becoming malignant.

From clinical work to large-group processes

In order to examine several means by which clinical psychoanalysis might assist policy-makers and others in dealing with societal coexistence, integration, or absorption, I will first turn attention to clinical work with individuals who have “split” identities, such as those with borderline personality organizations. Can our clinical observations of those in whom “two identities” co-exist help us determine methods to approach split societies? Furthermore, can our clinical efforts to “integrate” the internal worlds of borderline patients and help them experience only one identity suggest strategies for societal integration or absorption (Volkan, 2000a).

The answer to these questions is both “yes” and “no.” Some phenomena appear both in attempts at integrating an individual’s internal world and in responses to threats of coexistence and related issues in large-group situations. For example, we can draw a parallel between the individual anxiety that develops when one’s sense of self is threatened and the shared large-group anxiety that occurs when modifications in societal diversity begin. Both also elicit resistance to change. We can even see an analogy between identifying individual childhood traumas (personal historical images) in the development of a borderline personality disorder and identifying a mental representation of shared historical traumas (chosen traumas) that keeps two large-group neighbors emotionally apart. Just as clinicians need to interpret the meanings and influences of childhood traumas and their reflections in the treatment of borderline patients, policy-makers and others need to identify political strategies that tame the influence of “chosen traumas” (as well as “chosen glories”) in order to aid two separate large groups in coming together (Volkan, 1999c).

This is as far as the application of clinical treatment to large-group processes can go, however. Individual and large-group psychological processes have their own “lives”; thus, there are many ways in which we cannot apply the theoretical and technical aspects of individual borderline conditions to large-group processes. Reacting to a perceived corresponding phenomenon may even become dangerous, so it is important that methods remain distinct. For example, in a borderline individual in analysis, the main therapeutic aim is to help the person develop an integrated and cohesive sense of self. To do so, the individual needs to experience many crucial junctures during treatment in order to change the split inner structure into an integrated and cohesive one. The term crucial juncture originally comes from Melanie Klein (1946). In the contemporary psychoanalytic understanding, the term refers to bringing together libidinally determined self and object images with aggressively determined self and object images within the self-representation of an individual. As Otto Kernberg (1970) indicates, “the deep admiration and love for the ideal mother” and “the hatred for the distorted dangerous mother” (p. 81) meet in transference. He observes that at this crucial point, the patient experiences depression and suicidal thoughts “because he has mistreated the analyst and all the significant persons in his life, and he may feel that he has actually destroyed those whom he could have loved and who might have loved him” (p. 81).

My own experience with borderline patients (as well as with patients with narcissistic personality organizations who also have a split internal world) is that, when the analytic treatment is conducted systematically and properly, the patient experiences more mourning and less depression when he or she reaches a crucial juncture experience (Volkan, 1987). Mourning is a positive response to the possibility of losing previously split images. The borderline patient needs to experience repeated crucial juncture experiences with the accompanying mourning so as to develop an integrated identity. Mourning, however, is accompanied by affects of anger concerning the relinquishing of existing split structures. There also may be guilt, as Kernberg suggested, and therefore depression, when a patient accepts responsibility for previously projecting unwanted characteristics onto the “other.” The analyst helps the patient tolerate such affects, but the patient may also displace such affects into the analyst. In turn, the analyst tolerates keeping them within himself or herself before returning them to the patient. No successful integration of a borderline patient takes place without the patient experiencing grief, anger, guilt, and other emotions such as envy; otherwise, he or she is not going through a successful mourning. The analyst helps the patient to deal with these affects within the therapeutic space of the analyst’s office.

Let us now envision efforts toward large-group coexistence, integration, or absorption in terms of an analogy to a borderline patient’s crucial juncture experiences. Here we will see right away how different individual and societal processes are, and why we cannot simply apply what may be useful for an individual patient to political strategies for large groups. Crucial juncture in the patient leads to a mourning process—because loss is involved when you “make gray” and every loss produces a mourning process. What is lost are the absolute “black” and absolute “white.” During crucial juncture experiences, the analyst and analysand contain the associated affects in the analyst’s office. The movement of two opposing large groups toward some kind of togetherness, however, leads to large-group identity confusion and related shared affects that may set in motion dangerous social or political movements. While the objective in the clinical analysis of a borderline patient is to evolve a cohesive self-representation, the objective of coexistence and integration of large groups is to maintain a psychological (and by extension even a political) border, however permeable, between the opposing large-group identities. Even in Germany, where the aim is absorption, the political and social strategies built to accomplish this can only be successful through step by step adaptation, taking into consideration the impetus to find new suitable reservoirs for unwanted elements of the large-group identity and allowing absorption to happen gradually, so as to avoid the emergence of new reservoirs in a malignant fashion.

Those individuals who call themselves practitioners of international “conflict resolution” may in fact do harm if they force the removal of identity differences between large groups as swiftly as possible or focus on seeking “apologies” and encouraging “forgiveness” too hastily when dealing with coexistence and related issues. The psychology of large groups tells us that such concepts are only descriptive, and they should not mask a need for shared psychological processes that respect the principles of large-group interactions and for resolutions of shared resistances before adaptive solutions can be found.

Though crucial juncture experiences are essential for an individual to evolve a cohesive self-representation, the main tools that we utilize when dealing with patients are our understanding of transference and interpretive work. To stabilize societal coexistence, integration, and absorption, however, “interpretations,” of reasons for societal conflicts, by scholars or even by politicians, are ineffective until they become part of official policy. There will be a need to utilize such interpretations in building societal, legal, economic, and military institutions to stabilize modified societal conditions: In doing so, psychologically informed clinicians need to learn how to cooperate with colleagues in other disciplines in a systematic fashion.

Tree model: A methodology

To this end, my colleagues and I at the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction developed an interdisciplinary methodology for reducing ethnic tensions between opposing large groups. This approach is the way to put into action the concepts discussed above in a way that promotes peaceful and adaptive coexistence, integration, or absorption. Because the methodology is discussed in full detail elsewhere (Volkan, 1999c), only a brief summary is presented here.

Nicknamed the “tree model” to reflect that the slow growth and branching of a tree are analogous to the way our process unfolds, this methodology has three basic components or phases:

1) Psychopolitical diagnosis of the situation

2) Psychopolitical dialogues between members of opposing groups

3) Collaborative actions and institutions that grow out of the dialogue process

During the first phase, which includes in-depth interviews with a wide range of members of the groups involved, the interdisciplinary team of clinicians, historians, political scientists, and others begins to understand the main aspects of the relationship between the two groups and the surrounding situation to be addressed. During the psychopolitical dialogues— which consist of a series of multi-day meetings over several years—resistances are brought to the surface, articulated, and interpreted so that more realistic communication can take place. In order for the insights gained to have an impact on social and political policy as well as on the populace at large, the final phase requires the collaborative development of concrete actions, programs, and institutions. CSMHI’s methodology allows several disciplines to work together to articulate and work through underlying psychological and historical aspects of the tensions and then operationalize what is learned so that more peaceful coexistence can be achieved. Full details and examples of this methodology may be found in Volkan (1999c).

Conclusion

Psychoanalysts always have been aware of “invisible” walls that some individuals build around themselves. For example, when a person extensively uses the defense mechanisms of “isolation” and/or “intellectualization,” clinicians might describe the individual as living behind an emotional wall. It is also known that persons with narcissistic personality organizations often have what I have called “glass bubble fantasies” (Volkan, 1979a; Volkan and Ast, 1994; see also Modell, 1968). They fantasize about living in a lonely kingdom surrounded by a transparent wall. Although the psychology of physical/political borders has not been extensively researched through a psychoanalytic lens, there have been a few studies of border psychology. When reference is made to political or other physical borders, they are usually associated with personal, invisible walls. For example, Avner Falk (1974) reported a young Israeli’s dream of crossing the then-impassable Israeli-Jordanian border into Jordanian territory and noted that his patient’s associations showed him that the political border symbolized the psychological incest barrier.

There are also investigations of border psychology from the point of view of large-group conflict (Winnicott, 1969; Volkan, 1979b; Suistola, 2001). Those outside the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis have acknowledged the existence of a psychological component of political/physical borders and the need to address this aspect of boundaries between large groups when seeking conflict resolution or when attempting to bring historically separated groups together. For an explicit example of this acknowledgement by a politician, we return to then Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat’s historic 1977 visit to Israel when, before the Israeli parliament, he expressed a desire to move beyond political concerns to a more profound reconciliation:

…Yet there remains another wall. This wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us, a barrier of suspicion, a barrier of hallucination without any action, deed, or decision, a barrier of distorted and eroded interpretation of every event and statement. It is this psychological barrier which I described in official statements as constituting 70 percent of the whole problem.

This paper contributes to the exploration of political borders and their psychological meanings by focusing on large-group identity and shared anxieties that arise when there are threats to both large-group identity and psychologized physical borders. Large-group identity and border psychology thus are intertwined.

There is a beauty in human diversity, and most people can enjoy human diversity when they are not preoccupied with the pressures and anxieties associated with the repair and maintenance of their large-group tent (large-group identity). Recognizing the beauty of diversity, however, often requires a great deal of work, and I believe that psychoanalysts, when they are willing to become involved in interdisciplinary efforts, have much to offer those who wish to encourage diversity while resolving conflict.

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