Contribution
A late restatement, for a lay and clinical audience, of Volkan’s large-group psychology. It gives his picture of large-group identity, how a child acquires it, and why individuals and groups hold onto it. It sorts shared catastrophes by cause and argues that only trauma “at the hand of the Other” works on large-group identity. It defines chosen trauma and its companions, entitlement ideology and time collapse, and separates it from the undigested trauma of recent events.
Key insight
The ancestral injury is recalled in the service of the present identity. Volkan’s observation is about sequence: “after perceiving a threat against his or her large-group identity”, a participant “would start talking, with accompanying emotions, about a trauma suffered by his or her ancestors at the hand of an enemy centuries ago” (Variations of Shared Catastrophes and Chosen Traumas). The trauma’s image has undergone a “change of function” (Waelder 1936). It no longer records a loss to be mourned. It marks who “we” are, and it is “stitched on the large group’s tent canvas” (same section).
Assumptions
- Psychoanalytic object relations. Children externalize unintegrated “good” and “unwanted” self and object images into shared symbols. A Muslim grandmother’s “Pigs do not belong to our kind” makes the pig a reservoir for the child’s unwanted images; kilts and saunas take the good ones (Large-Group Identity).
- Freud’s group psychology, extended. Members put the leader in place of their ego ideal and identify with one another (Freud 1921). Volkan keeps the leader as the tent’s pole but puts the weight on the canvas, the shared identity.
- A psychobiological potential for “we-ness” and bias toward one’s own kind in infancy, cited to Stern, Greenspan, Emde, Bloom and others.
- The author’s observation as evidence. Everything rests on his analyses, supervisions, consultations and facilitated dialogues.
Key results
These are reported observations and definitions, not measured results.
- Large group (An Unnamed Childhood Feeling). “Thousands or millions of people, most of whom will never see or even know about each other as individuals, but who share many of the same sentiments.” Membership in tribal, ethnic, national and religious groups begins in childhood; cults, terrorist groups and extreme ideological movements are joined in adulthood, by exaggerating parts of a childhood identity or adopting new beliefs.
- The tent (Sigmund Freud’s “Group Psychology” and the Tent Metaphor). Two layers. The individual layer fits “snugly, like clothing”. The canvas is shared by everyone under the tent, leader included. Subgroup identities, such as a profession or a sports team, can be changed. “After going through the adolescence passage however, a person cannot change a core large-group identity that developed in childhood”, even when hiding or denying it.
- Transmission (Large-Group Identity). Children absorb their large-group identity through identifying with parents’ and others’ “narcissistic investments” in it and their prejudices. Parents and other adults “deposit images and ego tasks in children’s developing identities”. Volkan says what is known of this comes mainly from studies of Holocaust survivors and their offspring.
- Grasping the identity (When Individuals and Large Groups Grasp Large-Group Identities). “Under certain circumstances individuals subsume their personal identities behind their large-group identities.” Cases: a Jewish woman raised to pass as Christian, preoccupied in secret with the identity she hid; a Palestinian at a 1983 dialogue who touched a stone painted in the flag’s colours and said “As long as I have this, you can’t take my Palestinian identity from me”; German psychotherapists (PAKH, founded 1995) who re-enacted Third Reich identity issues among themselves half a century on.
- Kinds of catastrophe (Variations). Natural disasters are taken as fate or God’s will. After accidental man-made ones, blame falls on a few careless people. Trauma from war or ethnic, national, religious or ideological conflict has “an identifiable enemy large group that has deliberately inflicted pain”, and only it bears on large-group identity in this way.
- The central factor in conflict (Variations). Behind politics, economics and law, “the central psychological factor in starting and keeping alive large-group conflicts is the need to protect and maintain large-group identity.”
- Chosen trauma (Variations). “The shared mental image of the large group’s real, fantasized or even mythologized historical event, which, as it is transmitted from one generation to the next, undergoes a ‘change of function’ … and becomes a most significant large-group identity marker.” Examples from dialogues: a Russian parliamentarian on the Tatar-Mongol yoke of 1237–1242, Greek delegates on the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
- Entitlement ideology and time collapse (Variations). A chosen trauma carries a shared sense of entitlement “to recover what was lost in reality and in fantasy” by the ancestors. In a time collapse, what is fantasized from the past, felt now and expected for the future come together; fears are magnified and peaceful solutions blocked.
- Kosovo (Variations). Milošević, in power from 1987, created a time collapse for the Battle of Kosovo of 1389. In the year before its 600th anniversary, Prince Lazar’s remains were carried to almost every Serb village and town and received by mourners in black, then buried at the battleground on 28 June 1989. Serbs came to feel the defeat as recent “without being intellectually aware of it”. Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims were perceived as extensions of the Ottoman enemy; Volkan names dehumanization and “purification” as what time collapse can lead to, ending at Srebrenica.
- Undigested trauma (Undigested Traumas and Large-Group Mourning). The Holocaust “is not a chosen trauma”. Descendants keep survivors’ pictures and belongings and their stories are “alive”. It is a marker of Jewish shared identity, and preoccupation with it belongs to continuing large-group mourning. Yad Vashem is a shared “linking object” that keeps mourning alive and “is not associated with a sense of revenge”. “Not every major trauma at the hand of the Other evolves as a chosen trauma centuries later.”
- A new trauma recalls old ones (Covid-19 Trauma and Large-Group Identity). Two Jewish analysands in Istanbul, descendants of those welcomed after the 1492 expulsion from Spain: one felt that moving to remote sessions was going into hiding like Anne Frank; another bought a Vizsla, a breed known as “survivors”, which became for him a symbol of Jewish survival in Istanbul.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Large-group identity is a second layer of identity shared by the whole group, acquired in childhood through what parents deposit, and unchangeable in its core after adolescence | weak: asserted from clinical experience; the unchangeability is stated, not shown | Large-Group Identity; the tent section |
| C2 | The central psychological factor in starting and sustaining large-group conflict is the need to protect and maintain large-group identity | weak: impressions from facilitated dialogues, no method reported | Variations |
| C3 | A perceived threat to large-group identity brings up an ancestral trauma at the enemy’s hands, with emotion | weak to moderate as observation: repeated across dialogues and named examples, but anecdotal | Variations |
| C4 | The image of an ancestral trauma, real or mythologized, changes function across generations and becomes an identity marker (a chosen trauma) | weak: a definition with examples; the change of function is not traced | Variations |
| C5 | A chosen trauma can be reactivated by leaders in a time collapse, with entitlement, dehumanization and purification following | weak to moderate: one worked historical case, Kosovo, told without sources beyond Sells and Volkan’s own | Variations |
| C6 | Recent traumas whose stories are still alive, such as the Holocaust, are mourned and are not chosen traumas | weak: a classification by the author, with one example | Undigested Traumas |
Concepts
- large group: thousands or millions who mostly never meet but share sentiments; ethnic, national, religious or ideological.
- large-group identity: the shared “canvas” over each member’s individual identity.
- depositing: parents’ and other adults’ placing of images and ego tasks into a child’s developing identity.
- chosen trauma: the shared image of an ancestral injury by another group, real or mythologized, turned by transmission into an identity marker.
- change of function (Waelder): an image or act coming to serve a different psychic purpose from the one it began with.
- entitlement ideology: a shared sense of entitlement to recover what the ancestors lost.
- time collapse: the merging of past fantasy, present feeling and future expectation, so that the old event feels recent.
- linking object: an object through which a mourner keeps a link to what was lost; Volkan’s own piece of glass from a downed plane, and Yad Vashem for the group.
- undigested trauma: a recent shared trauma still felt personally and still being mourned.
Connections
- Volkan 2001 (LIT-1727), unread. This paper is a later and shorter statement of the same concepts. It cites neither the 2001 paper nor Group Analysis; its own sources for chosen trauma and time collapse are Bloodlines (1997) and later books.
- The narrative and identity route of QUESTION-297. Volkan is that route’s named source. The paper also shows the route is not separate from parenting: the identity is deposited by parents and grandparents, and Volkan’s evidence for transmission comes from survivor-offspring clinical studies.
- Cultural trauma (Alexander et al., LIT-1679), unread. Volkan’s chosen trauma is selected and charged through a leader and rituals, as with Lazar’s bones; that is close to the sociologists’ carrier groups, but Volkan describes it in psychic terms, not as a claim made in public.
- Self-categorization theory (THEORY-1114). “Subsume their personal identities behind their large-group identities” sounds like depersonalization, and the trigger, a threat from an out-group in a dialogue, is an intergroup comparison. Volkan does not cite the social identity tradition.
- Group entity versus category (TERM-096). Volkan’s large group is by definition people who do not interact, which is a category. Yet he treats it as one whole with a shared canvas, a leader and its own mourning, which is a group entity. He does not draw the line.
- CASE-098. A rivalry new fans inherit before they know why it matters has the same shape as a chosen trauma: a subgroup version, which Volkan says can be changed where the core identity cannot.
Bearing on the record
- The intergenerational trauma question (QUESTION-297). These
are inferences; Volkan does not ask the question in these terms.
- On the identity route, what becomes part of the descendant’s self is an image, not the ancestors’ injury as it was. A chosen trauma may be “real, fantasized or even mythologized”. So the descendant’s self is extended to a shared representation, not to the ancestors who suffered. If the event never happened as told, the identity is unchanged.
- The route runs through parents. Volkan’s mechanism is depositing by parents and grandparents. On his account the identity route and the parenting route are one route with two descriptions, so the question’s test, distress following identification “apart from … family transmission”, is one his account would expect to be hard to pass.
- Two kinds of inherited trauma. A chosen trauma is centuries old, no longer mourned, and kept as an identity marker and a claim. An undigested trauma, the Holocaust, is recent, carried by living stories and objects, and mourned. The question’s identity route covers the first clearly. The second is closer to the parenting route.
- The owner’s thesis, run backward (CLAIM-491). The thesis, as
QUESTION-297 puts it, says a descendant’s grief over an ancestral
injury is self-regarding: the injured self includes the ancestors.
Volkan supports a narrower form of this and complicates the rest. These
are inferences.
- Supported, for chosen trauma. The ancestral injury comes up when the descendant’s own identity is threatened, and it comes with entitlement to recover “what was lost”. The feeling is aroused by a threat to the present self and aimed at its restoration. That is self-regarding on a self that includes the group’s past.
- But it is not grief. Volkan’s chosen trauma has stopped being mourned; what is felt is grievance and entitlement, and its use is to mark and defend identity. As in identity fusion (NOTE-1256), the self being served is a self-concept to be kept intact, not a welfare.
- Grief proper belongs to the undigested case. For the Holocaust, descendants hold pictures, belongings and stories of particular people, and mourn them. Volkan does not say whether that mourning is for the self or for the lost. The thesis has its clear case in chosen trauma and its open case in mourning.
- Larger self or switched self. “Subsume their personal identities behind their large-group identities” describes the personal layer receding, a change of self in the thesis’s own terms (“What it does not say”). The tent’s two layers fit “larger” better: both are worn at once. Volkan uses both images and does not reconcile them.
- The triviality objection (CLAIM-492). Volkan offers a mark of the extended self apart from caring: the identity is fixed in childhood, unchangeable in its core after adolescence, and carried by symbols (the Palestinian’s stone, kilts, saunas). And his trigger is a threat to identity, not a reminder of the ancestors’ suffering. If that held, it would be a criterion that comes apart from caring about the ancestors. But nothing is measured; the claim is clinical impression.
- Batson’s objection (CLAIM-494). Not addressed.
- A dated note should be added to QUESTION-297 (proposed text in section 3). The thesis’s note of “the thesis in time” need not change; a cross-reference from the question’s note is enough.
- No THEORY filed. Chosen trauma is recorded in the question; the evidence is too thin for a THEORY.
- No ML instruction.
Limitations
- Not the 2001 paper. What Volkan argued in Group Analysis in 2001 is still unread; this is a restatement twenty years on.
- A lecture, not a study. No method, sample, coding or comparison. Cases are the author’s patients, supervisees and dialogue participants, told from memory.
- No contrary cases. Nothing says how often a threatened identity did not bring up an ancestral trauma, or which groups have none.
- Social psychology is absent. The paper does not cite social identity or self-categorization work on intergroup threat.
- Errors and typos.
- Auschwitz-Birkenau is said to have been “liberated in Germany”; it is in Poland (An Unnamed Childhood Feeling).
- 27 January 2021 is called “the 75th anniversary” of the liberation of 1945; it was the 76th (Abstract).
- The “always possible to bind together” quotation is cited to Freud 1917, p. 114. The reference list gives Freud 1917 as “Taboo of virginity”, Standard Edition vol. 11, pp. 191–208, which does not contain p. 114. The words are from Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition vol. 21.
- “subjective to suggestions” for “subject to” (the tent section); “prejudice toward black persons” for “prejudiced” (When Individuals and Large Groups Grasp); “at the hand the Other” (Covid-19 section); “the joint Catholic Monarch” for “Monarchs” (same); “Adolph Hitler” (Variations); “Sigmund freud’s” in a heading.
Open questions
- Does a threat to large-group identity, made in a controlled way, raise the salience of an ancestral trauma, and does the effect follow identification rather than knowledge of the events? That would put Volkan’s central observation to the test QUESTION-297 asks for.
- Do descendants feel a mythologized injury as strongly as a documented one? If so, what the self extends to is the group’s story, not its history.
- When does an undigested trauma become a chosen one? Volkan says not every trauma does, and gives no conditions beyond time.