Conference Reports

On Otherness

Friday March 16, 2007 conference speaker Vamik Volkan. Reporter Leide Porcu. On March 16th and 17th, The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research held a conference, On Otherness, at the Village Community School, in New York. The conference tackled the topic of otherness in and outside the consulting room. It included speakers such as Vlamik Volkan, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Anni Bergman, Sheldon Bach, and Salman Akhtar. In this paper, I report on Vlamik Volkan's presentation, which was held on Friday evening and was introduced by Carolyn Ellman.

The concept of otherness is basic to the psychoanalytic process, defined in the play between similarity and difference developed in the transference. In the dyad, otherness may not be in the foreground in periods of attunement, however, it is always present, even if the therapist and patient belong to the same culture. When analyst and patient belong to different cultures, the sense of otherness is less insidious, because it is in the open. However, such a relationship provides new challenges for treatment, requiring more self-reflection and attention to cultural differences. In a world in which globalization so rapidly affects people's sense of identity, which becomes increasingly hybrid and situationally defined, this conference attempted to open up a space for different points of view in order to better understand a population that is deeply affected by culture change. This population needs to be understood not only in terms of intrapsychic dynamics, but also in the context of the shifting worlds they inhabit.

Psychoanalysis also offers its tools to understand social dynamics that go beyond the consulting room, and indeed the social sciences have borrowed Psychoanalytic concepts to provide an understanding of global dynamics and conflicts. Professor Volkan's contribution to the conference illuminated this latter aspect, discussing his experience as a leader of a multidisciplinary team engaged in conflict resolution in various "hot" areas around the world. Among other things, professor Volkan is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University Of Virginia School Of Medicine and a training analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. In his talk, Dr. Volkan spoke about the applicability of psychoanalytic concepts to the behavior of large groups, such as an ethnic group or a religious group. He warned against a simplistic application of psychoanalytic concepts developed to understand and treat the individual directly to larger groups, because in these new contexts, these concepts may not have the same validity, i.e., the whole is not simply the sum of its parts.

Even when considering an individual action, there is a great difference between an individual acting for personal reasons and one acting on behalf of a large group.

To highlight this point, Volkan contrasted the difference between an individual committing murder for personal reasons and committing it on behalf of a larger group. In the former case, the individual act is an aberration, which is not supported by the larger group and indicates a psychological breakdown. In the latter case, his action bears the force of the group as a whole. The act loses its individuality and the instrument used for the killing becomes invested with new power and significance. Indeed, the person who acts in the name of the group, a terrorist, for instance, is often not a deranged person or a sociopath, but a lucid person acting within the frame of a particular ideology, which is, by definition, unquestioned by the people who subscribe to it. Volkan offered the metaphor of a tent, symbolizing group identity, covering all group members: when the tent shakes or its canvas is rent, its members panic and set up survival measures to repair the tent. Though the metaphor is intriguing, it does not take into consideration the fact that large groups may not be so uniform and cohesive, that changes take place, and that dissonant voices may coexist and have influence within the group. For Volkan, people inhabit simultaneously an individual identity and a group identity, "They are like two layers of clothing, the individual layer fits each of us snuggly. The second layer, one's core group identity, is loose fitting, but allows us to share a sense of sameness with others under a common large-group tent." As the group is threatened and feels vulnerable, the sense of belonging to the group intensifies and the individual tends to play down aspects of his identity in favor of the core group identity. In these circumstances, the individual talks like the group, and downplays individual idiosyncrasies in favor of what the group strives to maintain when threatened with loss. As Volkan maintained, the refugees and people from opposite camps that he interviewed over many years of research, all spoke the same core group language. The same laws also apply in more upbeat scenarios, e. g., all sports fans of the same team tend to talk alike. (And yet, wouldn't we hear dissonant voices with a closer and more extended listening?)

Volkan identified the mourning process as problematic for large groups and his description seemed to outline basic psychoanalytic principles: loss can be dealt with by reciprocating humiliation; the groups can develop a fantasy of restitution; or loss may remain unmourned and transmitted as intergenerational trauma. Then, sadism and masochism become rampant, as people attempt to "repair their tent." Destructive mechanisms of projection, projective identification, and purification (i.e., expulsion from one's culture of all that is considered alien, so that the "essence" of the group may shine) emerge.

Volkan identified the lack of boundary between different groups (or boundaries that become too solid when groups are regressed) as a major cause of conflict. There should be "swiss cheese walls," Volkan maintained (alluding to one of Winnicott's elaborations on transitional space) so that different ethnic or religious groups do not feel vulnerable about their identities and have a safe place to interact and negotiate their differences and similarities. Following this principle, when he leads negotiations among representatives of opposing groups, he helps them find a middle space in which to talk to one another, not too close and not too far (he used the image of the accordion), so that mutually profitable, lasting, and realistic decisions can be made.

The IPTAR conference on otherness not only engaged the audience in a dialogue concerning the otherness of our multicultural patient population, but also invited the psychodynamic community to get out of their consulting rooms and engage actively in the resolution of large scale conflict. But if we decide to engage the larger social context, would it be helpful to critically engage the corpus of knowledge and techniques developed by "other" disciplines that have studied cultures and groups for a long time, such as ethnolinguists, anthropologists, and sociologists, so we can avoid repeating mistakes that they have made and corrected over decades of rigorous work? For instance, attention to the work on performatives that Judith Butler expanded from J.L. Austin, the Foucauldian notion of biopower, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and the Gramscian concept of ideology might have enriched Volkan's discussion.

In addition, this conference inspired some self-reflective afterthoughts about our discipline. Though psychoanalysis found fertile ground in the social sciences and the humanities and has been absorbed and used by others, as a theory of the mind and as psychotherapy, it has experienced attacks from evidence-based modes of treatment (such as CBT), which are now increasingly gaining acceptance in public opinion, in the managed care system, and in the scientific world. In the face of these "attacks," could it be that our core group identity has solidified, and that we have rejected other perspectives to protect our "truth?" Perhaps we should apply Winnicott's wisdom about erecting semiporous walls, good enough to keep group identity safe, but porous enough to allow a transitional space for dialogue and mutual enrichment, to ourselves. Should we consider a dialogue with the "others," the evidence based treatment practitioners in order to see, without essentialism and rigidity, what they have learned from us and what we can learn from them?