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vamik volkan
“MOURNING is as individualized as a fingerprint.”
VAMIK VOLKAN
Vamik Volkan was born an ethnic minority on the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea, a republic plagued by violence.
While training to be a psychiatrist Prof. Volkan's medical school roommate was shot and killed by Greek terrorists on the streets of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. This was a pivotal moment and the theme of grief and its complications lies at the heart of his work.
Professor Volkan’s ideas have shaped today's leading model of CONFLICT RESOLUTION
He is at the forefront of understanding societal conflict through the lens of psychology.
Based on extensive fieldwork in conflict resolution, Prof. Volkan has created a new vocabulary for understanding large group identity and shared emotion. His work is singular in how it illuminates the effects of shared trauma, its transmission across generations, and the important task of collective mourning.
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Rather than imposing a solution to intergroup conflict the purpose of dialogue was always to help antagonistic parties discover their own unique remedies.
WORKING FOR PEACE
In the 1980s Professor Volkan was chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, which brought Israelis, Egyptians and Palestinians together for unofficial dialogues. His team has facilitated dialogue between representatives of enemy groups in countries suffering from war and war-like conditions for decades.​
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In 1987, Professor Volkan founded the Center for the Study of Mind & Human Interaction at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine. CSMHI, the first of its kind, brought an interdisciplinary team of experts to traumatized regions of the globe, to war zones, and refugee camps in effort to replace societal violence with dialogue.
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Professor Volkan is the Senior Erik Erikson scholar at the Erikson Institute of Education & Research at the Austen Riggs Center. Building on Erikson's term "identity," he developed the concept of large-group identity, which he believes is the central factor in international relations.