Vamık Volkan

CSMHI applied a growing theoretical and field-proven base of knowledge to issues such as ethnic tension, racism, large-group identity, terrorism, societal trauma, immigration, mourning, transgenerational transmissions, leader-follower relationships, and other aspects of national and international conflict.

Volkan founded the CSMHI's journal, Mind & Human Interaction, which examined the relationship between psychoanalysis and history, political science and other fields.

He had the honor to give the keynote address in Cape Town, South Africa in 2006, celebrating Archbishop Desmond Tutu's life of peaceful justice and the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's activities.

He was a member of the International Advisory Board, Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; an Inaugural Yitzak Rabin Fellow, Rabin Center for Israeli Studies, Tel Aviv, Israel; an honorary supervisor and consultant, Società per lo studio dei disturbi della personalità in Milan, Italy; chairperson of the Select Advisory Commission of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Critical Incident Response Group that examined the 1993 Waco, Texas incident; a visiting professor of law, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts; a visiting professor of political science at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria and at Bahceșehir University, Istanbul, Turkey; a board member of the Freud Foundation in Vienna and a member of the Working Group on Terror and Terrorism, International Psychoanalytic Association.

Volkan is the author, coauthor, editor or coeditor of over fifty psychoanalytic and psychopolitical books some of which has been translated into Turkish, German, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Greek and Finnish.

Volkan has given hundreds of keynote addresses and lectures in Australia, Austria, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Estonia, Georgia, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Israel, India, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Northern Cyprus, Norway, Peru, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, South Ossetia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the U.S. Volkan is the president emeritus of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) which he established in 2007.

Volkan's research focuses on the application of psychoanalytic thinking between countries and cultures, individual and societal mourning, transgenerational transmissions of trauma and the therapeutic approach to primitive mental states.

[2] Volkan's "re-grief therapy", building on the work of Edward Bibring, sought to free pathological mourners by taking them back "to review the circumstances of the death – how it occurred, the patient's reaction to the news and to viewing the body, the events of the funeral, etc.".