Peacemaking in the 21st century

an interview with Vamik Volkan

MC: You’ve been practicing “informal diplomacy” for over 30 years. How did you become interested in international relations?
VV: In 1979, Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, went to Israel, to the Knesset and he said that there was a wall between Arabs and Israelis. He said the wall was a psychological wall that constituted 70% of the problems between them. This statement was a turning point in my life. The American psychiatric Association’s Committee on International Affairs was given the task to examine Sadat’s statement. I was a member of this committee. my colleagues and I brought influential Egyptians, Israelis, and then Palestinians together for unofficial dialogues.
One day I’m conducting a meeting and next to me General Shlomo Gazit of Israel is sitting. Shlomo was a hero of the Six Day War and he was the general in charge of occupied territories. Sitting next to him there was a younger Palestinian psychiatrist. The Palestinian man was anxious sitting next to an Israeli general and he put his hand in his pocket and started playing. This went on for a while until I said to him “are you aware you are doing this?” And then he told me: he had a small stone in his pocket, with Palestinian colors painted on it. He told me that in Palestine in those days (1983-84) many people carried these stones, which represented their Palestinian-ness. Although I’ve been exposed to the meaning of large groups from childhood on, this incident of the Palestinian sitting next to General Gazit brought the importance of group belonging clearly to my awareness.

MC: Your journey in political psychology has also been a very personal one, too. Would you tell us about your personal story?
VV: To some degree my childhood and other historical events also played a role in my becoming interested in international relations. I’ll tell you about one of them that stays in my mind very vividly. When I was growing up in Cyprus, there was a time that people believed that the Nazis would come to the island and conquer us. They had bombed Crete and a common fear was they would also bomb Cyprus because they wanted to retaliate against British influence over the Suez Canal. As you recall at that time, Cyprus was a British colony.
I remember my father bought a German dictionary in case the Nazis invaded he would try to negotiate. He kept it in a black box – a big black -- where he also, by the way, kept a copy of Freud’s Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
One day, in elementary school one I was playing outside and I looked up and a British Spitfire shot down an Italian plane, the plane exploded and fell not far from where we were playing. The Italian pilot came down by parachute and was saved. But we ran to the wreckage and I picked up a piece of glass from this airplane. Looking back now, I kept this glass until 1957, until I came to America. This piece of glass linked me to this event, which was very frightening for a little kid.
MC: Please explain your concept of “linking objects”?
VV: A linking object is an object that a person makes it psychologically speaking “magical.” This item links you to a trauma and often to a dead person. You put the image of the dead person or trauma in that object, psychologically speaking. You put your corresponding part in that same object and because it’s outside yourself you can postpone working through your emotions or mourning. Instead of feeling the psychological issue you externalize it.
Adults who do not have complicated mourning cherish keepsakes to remember a lost person or thing. A keepsake does not function as a repository where a complicated mourning process is externalized. A typical keepsake provides continuity between the time before the loss and the time after the loss, or generational continuity if the lost person or item belonged to a previous generation. On the other hand, a linking object is a psychological “tool” utilized for dealing with complicated mourning or sometimes reactivating “normal” mourning process years after the loss, as I will illustrate below. A dead person’s framed picture on a mantle with which the mourner is not preoccupied is a keepsake. When a mourner, even many years after the loss, is preoccupied with a similar picture by ritualistically touching it daily while developing tears, or locking it in a drawer while experiencing anxiety whenever the drawer is unlocked, or not being able to travel long distance without first placing the picture in a special location in his or her baggage we can assume that this picture now is a “magical” tool utilized to maintain complicated mourning
MC: This touches on one of qualities of your work that make it so exceptional, that is how you have been able to use your personal experience for creative and articulate theoretical formulation. The personal and the general are intimately, organically entwined. You have written extensively on the subject of mourning, that of complex and “perennial mourning,” of the problems of letting go. Would you speak to how we mourn?
VV: Let me start from the definition of mourning, psychologically speaking. The easiest example is somebody you love dies. Let’s say you are not prepared for this death. One day this other person is sitting next to you, the next day he or she is gone, physically disappeared. Nothing left. Except you have an image of this person, in your mind doesn’t die. It remains in your mind. You retain a kind of mental double of the person who’s gone. So mourning means: what do you do with this mental double? You go over this mental double, the different parts of this relationship, both the good and painful aspects. You laugh, you cry. You go through anniversaries of meeting this person and then slowly this relationship, this internal relationship with this mental double, gets tamed. Mourning is a kind of psychological burial, but never all the way. It’s not like physical burial. We cannot fully bury it. It is always in your mind until you die. So in a sense the mourning process never ends. But it can find resolution in in a more practical way, when it becomes tame and doesn’t intrude in your life.
In the United States for the last 20 years I have been examining World War II orphans. They are now in their fifties and sixties. There were 180,000 children after World War II who were left without their fathers. Some of them never saw their fathers. I’ve been going to their annual meetings for 20 years and the war never ends. Often it’s passed on as a psychological task for their children to perform. But for some, after so many years, they're finding ways to mourn their fathers.
For many different reasons your relationship with the mental double of the dead person can be very creative, or on the other hand, very troublesome. Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal in memory of his dead wife. Who the heck am I to say he is pathological? So dealing with mental doubles is complex.
MC: How does a morning process due to a major loss and trauma shared by tens, hundreds of thousands or millions of people belonging to the same large group effect international relations?
VV: There are different kinds of massive traumas. are natural disasters such as an earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Japan. But there’s another massive trauma that is different than others: injury by the hand of Others. People from one large group deliberately hurt you. They occupy you, humiliate you, dehumanize you, kill your family members and friends, and arrest many normal psychological functions. These kind of massive traumas are very different. So mourning means: what does a society do to deal with the mental double of lost things?
The mental double of a shared massive trauma at the hand of the Other and unfinished psychological tasks such as mourning, wish to reverse humiliation, desire to have revenge and so on are passed from generation to generation. Some of them evolve as “identity markers” for a large-group. Only one ethnic group or national group has this shared mental double. When this happen I call this shared mental double a “chosen trauma,”—chosen to identify one specific large group.
Imagine a large group as millions of people living under one tent. On this tent there are designs. One design is the image of your history. Thus I say, “under this tent there are millions of people, but they all can be connected with that image of history.” Chosen trauma is that image of history. People said to me, why do you use the word “chosen?” People do not choose to be traumatized. What I mean is these images are chosen as markers of the large group.
MC: What else societies do after a shared trauma and loss?
People build monuments. Whatever feelings we have, we lock them in the marble and metal. It took Americans a long time to build a World War II memorial, a very long time. I was there at its opening with probably 400 World War II orphans. And it was a tremendously big day for them, a turning point. At last they had a monument that where they could put unfinished parts of their mourning. The Vietnam memorial is the best, the best monument for helping Americans mourn. You go there, the names are there. It’s black marble so your picture gets reflected on the names. You have , psychologically speaking, a deep interaction with the lost ones.
MC: As founder and director of The Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI, 1987-2002), you studied the political and historical issues that feed social conflicts as well as their psychological underpinnings. This Center, the first of its kind, brought interdisciplinary teams of experts to traumatized areas in the Middle East, the Soviet Union, the Baltic Republics, The Republic of Georgia, Albania, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, the USA. Please tell us about one memory of your work with CSMHI.
VV: I’ll tell you one very memorable experience where I almost got killed. Tskhinvali is the capital city of South Ossetia. South Ossetia is in the legal boundary of the Republic of Georgia. After the Soviet empire collapsed and everybody said, “who are we now?” Georgians and South Ossetians started fighting. In one of the wars between Georgians and South Ossetians, the Georgians conquered the cemetery of South Ossetia at Tskhinvali. During the fight, South Ossetians continued to die. Where were they going to bury them? There is a big schoolyard on Lenin Avenue, Number 5. So they buried their dead people in the schoolyard. Later on they put a statue there called “The Crying Father.”
According to South Ossetian tradition, fathers are not supposed to cry. So if you make a monument and call it Crying Father, there is very complicated mourning. So I was very interested in seeing this place and we were visiting Tskhinvali with Georgians. So we walked there. As soon as we arrived, it took about three minutes, and I had a Kalashnikov at my head. It was such a “hot” place that a foreigner coming there induced in them unbelievable emotions. How dare I contaminate their sacred site? It all has to do with large-group mourning. Some monuments remain very hot because mourning has not taken place and going there re-traumatizes you.
MC: This experience coincides with your discovery of “hot spots,” which became an important element of your work in conflicted areas .
VV: Yes, when I go to a conflicted area I need to know what’s going on, not only by reading newspapers or talking to leaders or taxi drivers, or children, you need to know what else in this society because there are societal processes that are shared and are specific for that large group. My team and I found something we named “hot spots.” They are locations which became “symbols” of the conflict, such as the school yard where the Crying Father monument stands or locations where mass killings took place.
We found these places also when we were work in Paldiski in Estonia where the Soviets had built a nuclear factory. This location which Estonians were not allowed to visit, became very symbolic for Estonians after gaining their independence from Russian. A “hot spot” is where the aggression and victimization get symbolized, where all the historical images of the past condensed into the present situation
If you create a sense of security around a hot spot and bring representatives of the victimized group there together with those of the perpetrators, then people talk and you learning a great deal about conscious and unconscious processes. You sit down on a chair or a rock and listen to them you get to know what is going on emotionally in the societies. So hot places became a very important area for us to visit. It’s just like having a patient on the couch and the patient tells you a very important dream and you suddenly understand patient internal world. So hot places became like dreams for us to understand societal processes.
MC: You are the Senior Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA and you had spent a week per year with Erik Erikson, his wife and other scholars during the last years of Erikson. You have enriched and broadened his notion of “identity.” One of your main concepts is “large-group identity.” Would you explain what you mean by this?
VV: The concept of identity was not a psychoanalytic term before Erikson. Freud, as far as I know, only used it several times in his writings.
A large group is tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who will never meet in their lifetimes, but they have a shared identity whether tribal, nationalistic, religious, ethnic, political/ideological and so on. They share the same sentiments from childhood on: the same culture, food, dance, nursery rhymes, the same language and most importantly the same history. Some part of their history may be mythologized and fantasized : “We are Apaches,” “”We are Lithuanian Jews” “We are Kurdish,” “We are Sunni Muslims,” “We are communists.”
When our large group is attacked, or our large group narcissism is hurt, or we are humiliated as, as Arabs or as Jewish people or as Americans, we begin noticing our large group identity. In certain situations, large group identity becomes much more important than our individual identity.
If you go to refugee camps after a war you see that obviously they don’t have much to eat, they express concern for their children. They refer each other with their first names and so on. So individuality is there. But if you listen with a third ear everything is, “we, we, we.” Also there are “them,” those people “out there.” Large group identity becomes very prominent and under stressful situations, you will do everything, including accepting masochistic suffering, in order to protect your large-group identity. In all my years of work in international relations, I came to the conclusion that this abstract concept called large-group identity is the most important thing in international relations.
MC: You write about how, when large groups are under stress, their leader’s personality becomes very important. There are some leaders who are reparative after a massive trauma and then others who are destructive or “malignant.” Would you say something about the leader-follower relation?
VV: Under stress people, in general, look up to the leader. Sometimes a leader’s personality becomes very important in changing history. When Slobodan Milosevic came to power in the former Yugoslavia, obviously he had his own problems. But he ignited a psychological process that existed within the society. What existed was the mental image of the Battle of Kosovo, which had taken place 600 years previously. He reactivated their chosen trauma as if it occurred yesterday so that people came together in nationalistic way.
In 1389 a battle took place between the Ottomans and Serbs. During the battle the Serbian leader Prince Lazar was killed. There were singers and poets during the following decades who made the Battle of Kosovo a chosen trauma and the Serb leader who died in it a mythological hero. Six hundred years later Milosevic, ordered the excavation of the body of the Serbian leader, Prince Lazar, put it in a coffin and, for one year, took it around to Serbian villages where people again mourned Lazar’s death. During this time every night they buried Lazar. The next day, with great ceremony, they reincarnated him. I call this “time collapse,” when images of the past and also the emotions associated with that historical image come alive in the present.
Milosevic built a monument at the historic site of the Battle of Kosovo and spoke there at the 600th anniversary of the war in order to rouse an “entitlement ideology” called “Cristoslavism.” He brought alive the shared “memory” and its emotions, the victimization, the sentiment of “never again” and the desire for revenge. Some leaders use entitlement ideologies, to launch new tragedies. In our work in informal diplomacy, we realized how important these chosen traumas are, how they can be reactivated, and how they are a psychological factor in international relations. Unless you diagnose it at its beginnings and work to understand it you cannot tame such a political process.
When Russian delegates felt humiliated during years-long dialogues with Estonians they would start talking about the Tatar invasion. How many centuries ago did the Russians suffer under the Tatars? When you bring delegates of enemies together and they get anxious, they want to shore up their identity and so they go to their chosen traumas, their large-group identity markers.
My interdisciplinary team from CSMHI would analyze what gets reactivated under certain stresses and how it finds its way into politics. As I visit different parts of the world, I think to myself every country in certain ways has historical images that are shared. They get reactivated when there is a present conflict. We need to understand this and expand diplomatic negotiations by including such obstacles in discussions.
MC: What role does ritual play in consolidating group identity?
VV: There are peace time rituals and “purification” rituals. A new large group, under certain conditions that can be summarized as “who are we now?” (for example, after gaining independence, after a revolution, after responding the influence of a “bad” or “good” transforming leader) often becomes like a snake shedding its skin. The national cemetery of Latvia is a fascinating because it reflects their history of various large-group events. You see a tombstone with a hammer and sickle, on the next one a cross, you see the Star of David on a few, and on many a swastika. This situation reflected a fragmentation in Latvian large-group identity.When Latvia became independent after the Soviet empire collapsed Latvian metaphorically wanted to develop a “new” large-group identity and said: “Who are we now?” Thus, they searched for an object to externalize and project their unwanted aspects, aspects that would prevent them to get together and develop a new Latvian identity. Thus the parliament of Latvia wanted to exhume the Russian bodies in the national cemetery. I call this purification.
MC: You and your colleagues are some of the first to study how transgenerational transmissions take place as in The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and Its Consequences (Vamık Volkan, Gabriele Ast, William F. Greer Jr., 2002) How has your work on this subject changed how we think about the clinical setting?
VV: In the psychoanalytic literature there are papers referring to mutual resistances that may prevail when both the analyst and the analysand belong to the same large group that has been massively traumatized by an external historical event. We can wonder how many Jewish analysts-- some of them very influential in the field of psychoanalysis, both in the US and elsewhere --after World War II without being aware of it, influenced the application of psychoanalytic treatment in a way that tended to ignore Holocaust-related external reality. Practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, with some exceptions, have basically tended to treat their patients without much interest in or attention paid to political or diplomatic issues and the enormous public health problems that are found in massively traumatized societies. Only during last decades we began to focus on the importance of the influence of massive traumas and transgenerational transmissions in individuals’ psychological make-up. Many scholars are contributing to this field and the continuing influence of the Holocaust through generations. In our book, we tried to illustrate how the Holocaust related transgenerational transmissions take place in depth through clinical examples.
I should also add that, when writing about transgenerational transmissions and related issues some colleagues still apply theories of individual psychology to large-group processes without taking into consideration that once they begin, large-group processes take on their own specific directions and appear as new political, social or ideological movements. Recently however, especially since September 11, 2001, practicing clinicians have shown more interest in large-group psychology.
MC: Animals have been a prevalent theme in your work, as symbols or what you call “reservoirs of externalization.” I understand that you like animals, as you do gardening and tending to your many fruit trees in North Cyprus. Tell about the birds of Cyprus.
VV: I was born in Cyprus when Cyprus was a British colony. But I came to the United States in 1957 after medical training and in 1960 Cypriot Turks and Cypriot Greeks on the island started fighting. Cypriot Turks were put in enclaves in only three percent of the island and they lived like that for eleven years in absolutely sub-human conditions.
In 1968 the borders of the island loosened up so I was able to return to Cyprus. It was the first time I went back the island and the first time my family was now able to leave their enclave and come to the airport to meet me. But they did not speak out loud, only whisper, because for six years they had been kept out of “enemy territory.” So we pass over into the enclave and I haven’t seen my mother, my sisters, and my father for ages and I have newly born relatives. My family takes me right away and they introduce me to three cages of birds! Parakeets, which are not native birds in Cyprus. They say to me, “this is the mother bird. These are the grandmother birds. Look at this new one.”
I was shocked. I had come to Cyprus with so much difficulty, with all kind of emotions. I go to my house and instead of introducing me to human beings, they introduce me to birds. The next day I go out to a little shop to get groceries and there are a hundred birds in cages. I cannot even get a piece of bread without stepping over them. Then I go to other people’s houses, everywhere… thousands of birds in cages. Again, you have to understand societal processes. Birds represented Cypriot Turks in cages, in enclaves; they were imprisoned. But as long as they took care of the birds, they believed that they, themselves, would survive. As long as birds sang, they had hope.
Later when I became known by some diplomats and state department officials they would call me and ask “what’s going on in Cyprus?” The only thing they would remember about the emotional tragedy was the story of Birds of Cyprus.
MC: What do you see, and hope for, in the future of psychoanalysis?
VV: I trained as a psychoanalyst in order to become a kind of therapeutic instrument, in order to help somebody who lies on my couch be able to, oh what should I say, play with the cruelties of life. Life is full of cruelties and you can play with them or suffer with them.
The same is true of large groups. But as psychoanalysts we rarely studied these things on the field. Nobody teaches you about international relations in medical school and in psychoanalytic institutes.
Large-groups are important especially now. The world has changed so much after colonists left Africa, after the Soviet empire collapsed. Everyone is saying, “Who are we now?” Globalization is good in ways, but it also threatens large-group identities. As an American, you may not understand this because America is what my friend Peter Loewenberg calls a “synthetic” country. People from different ethnic groups, different national groups and religious groups came together under one umbrella, “the great melting pot.” This is a different process of national independence and America is still a very young nation.
The rise of new communications technology is amazing. Why don’t we put that kind of energy and resources into understanding human nature? Even now, people ask me “where’s your evidence?” as if this is an evidence-based science, whatever that means. You cannot measure fantasies. You cannot measure unconscious processes or emotional feeling states. We can describe them. We see them and know they exist.
As psychoanalysts, we need to examine large-group processes with the same devotion we do for the individual. Hopefully these ideas will be systematized and incorporated into diplomatic relations. I suggest that nobody should be President of a country for 30 years such as Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Gaddafi. It’s as if leading a country were like owning a farm. After September 11, there is a wish and an urgency to use psychoanalytic ideas to understand collective behavior. The history of diplomacy is realpolitik, which works well when things are routine. But in a world of terrorism who do you talk to? We must bring our knowledge to politicians, diplomats and State Departments in order to find new strategies towards a better world. This is a noble profession.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201308/peacemaking-in-the-21st-century

About Face

For half a century, one theory about the way we experience and express emotion has helped shape how we practice psychology, do police work, and even fight terrorism. But what if that theory is wrong?

By Shannon Fischer | Boston Magazine | July 2013

Photographs by Jesse Burke

Forty-six years ago a young San Francisco–based cowboy of a psychologist named Paul Ekman emerged from the jungle with proof of a powerful idea. During the previous couple of years, he had set out trying to prove a theory popularized in the 19th century by Charles Darwin: that people of all ages and races, from all over the world, manifest emotions the same way. Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Everywhere he went, from Japan to Brazil to the remotest village of Papua New Guinea, he asked subjects to look at those faces and then to identify the emotions they saw on them. To do so, they had to pick from a set list of options presented to them by Ekman. The results were impressive. Everybody, it turned out, even preliterate Fore tribesmen in New Guinea who’d never seen a foreigner before in their lives, matched the same emotions to the same faces. Darwin, it seemed, had been right.
Ekman’s findings energized the previously marginal field of emotion science. Suddenly, researchers had an objective way to measure and compare human emotions—by reading the universal language of feeling written on the face. In the years that followed, Ekman would develop this idea, arguing that each emotion is like a reflex, with its own circuit in the brain and its own unique pattern of effects on the face and the body. He and his peers came to refer to it as the Basic Emotion model—and it had significant practical applications. In the late 1960s, for example, Ekman realized that he could detect the microexpressions of emotion that appear on the face of a liar. Anybody trained in how to properly recognize these microexpressions, he would later argue, could detect a liar 70 percent of the time. He published his first article on the subject in 1969, and three months later the CIA came knocking, eager to learn more.
So began a meteoric rise to fame. Since that first article, Ekman has consulted for not only the CIA but also the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Police Department, and the Transportation Security Administration, which has spent more than a billion dollars training its airport agents in techniques based on Ekman’s theories. He’s published scores of influential papers and books, and his findings have been verified and expanded upon in hundreds of studies. In 2001 the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the entire 20th century. And in 2009 Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Ekman is a giant in his field, in other words. His ideas have powerfully shaped the science of emotion for half a century. But here’s the thing: What if he’s wrong?

“Honestly, this is going to sound terrible,” Lisa Barrett told me when I asked her about Ekman and his original study. “But at first, when I read that work, I thought, Well, nobody can take this seriously. This can’t possibly be right. It’s too cartoonish.” 
Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern, and for years she’s been troubled by Ekman’s ideas. People don’t display and recognize emotions in universal ways, she believes, and emotions themselves don’t have their own places in the brain or their own patterns in the body. Instead, her research has led her to conclude that each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.
This may seem like nothing more than a semantic distinction. But it’s not. It’s a paradigm shift that has put Barrett on the front lines of one of the fiercest debates in the study of emotion today, because if Barrett is correct, we’ll need to rethink how we interpret mental illness, how we understand the mind and self, and even what psychology as a whole should become in the 21st century.
Twenty-one years ago, Barrett had no idea she’d be wading into this debate. In 1992 she was just another graduate student studying clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo—the MIT of Canada. She had every intention of becoming a therapist. True, she was unusually engrossed in the research side of her program. But the general type of study she was doing, exploring how people’s perceptions of themselves can lead to either anxiety or depression, was the perfect choice for a future shrink.
Times were hard for her back then. Her marriage was in tatters, her thesis adviser had just left town, she was in the middle of grueling comprehensive exams, and every time she attempted to run studies necessary for her research, they failed. In one particularly troublesome experiment, no one she tested could seem to distinguish anxiety from depression—even though differentiating the two was the entire point of the experiment. “If they reported feeling sad,” Barrett told me, “they also felt anxious. And if they reported feeling anxious, they also felt sad. And I thought, Well, can’t they tell the difference?” Every paper she read told her that they were two different emotional states of mind—one based in fear, the other in sadness.
It was a puzzle. Colleagues suggested that it was probably just normal statistical error and urged her to move on. But she couldn’t drop it. She’d already triple-checked her study design and crosschecked her subjects. What was left? She eventually decided it had to be the testing measures that she and others had been using. These, she realized, were actually useless when it came to assessing whether a person felt bad and worked up about it (anxious) or bad and lethargic about it (depressed). And that, in turn, called into question many of the supposedly successful studies that her work had been designed to replicate. Barrett wrote her work up, defended her Ph.D., did a clinical internship at the University of Manitoba, and then packed up for University Park, Pennsylvania, to start life as an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State.

An important question continued to nag Barrett. What was the best way to determine the emotions that people are feeling? The therapist in her wanted to use the information to help her patients; her inner researcher just wanted the answer. So she dove into the emotion literature, and what she found surprised her. After reviewing all of the studies she could find, she realized that, statistically speaking, the best that scientists of emotion could do was to determine whether someone was feeling good or bad.
For Barrett, that wasn’t good enough. So she kept looking. She signed up for a physiology and cardiovascular training fellowship, to learn how to measure physiological indicators herself. And then something shocking happened. She returned to those famous cross-cultural studies that had launched Ekman’s career—and found that they were less than watertight. The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think.
Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”
This exposed a fatal flaw in Ekman’s work as far as Barrett was concerned. “I mean, think about it,” she said. “When was the last time that you saw somebody win an Academy Award for going like this with fear”—at which point she mimicked for me the face in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Barrett wasn’t the first to question Ekman’s studies. A small handful of outlier psychologists had already begun a steady drumbeat of opposition. One had even shown he could throw the whole thing off by just showing subjects an “angry” face without including anger as a word to match it to. If people were presented with disgust or contempt instead, they happily chose one of those. But these naysayers were considered to be on the fringe. Why take them seriously when so much research already existed in Ekman’s favor?
Barrett found herself profoundly puzzled. “My experience of anger is not an illusion,” she told me. “When I’m angry, I feel angry. That’s real. But how can that be true if there’s no unique biological signature for anger?”
Barrett devoted herself to finding the answer to this question. In 1996 she accepted an assistant professorship at Boston College, where, abandoning her work as a practicing therapist, she continued to research the science of emotion. By then, brain imaging had become a useful tool, and emotion researchers were seizing on the technology to help them trace emotions back to their hotspots in the brain: fear to the amygdala, disgust to the insula, and so on. But with more reading and another training fellowship, this time in neuroscience, Barrett bumped up against the same old story. Data were mixed, conclusions uncertain. Fifty years of research in, only one thing was clear about the field: More research was necessary.

Barrett spent 14 years at Boston College, rising at a steady clip from assistant to associate to full professor. But by the time 2010 rolled around, her research needs and ambitions had outgrown her 1,000-square-foot lab. When Northeastern offered her a job that came along with a 3,500-square-foot multi-floor space, plus an architect to design it to her specifications, she took it. This past spring Northeastern promoted her to the status of University Distinguished Professor—the highest honor the school bestows on its faculty.
One afternoon last fall, I met Barrett at George Howell Coffee, in Newton, only a block or two from her home. While explaining exactly how the brain creates emotion—or, at least, how she believes it does—she opened a computer to show me what looked like a grainy black-and-white mishmash on the screen. “When most people look at this,” she said, “they don’t know what it is. It’s an example of experimentally induced experiential blindness. Your brain is taking in visual sensations from an object, but it can’t make sense of what it is.” The brain tries to fill in the blanks, she explained. “Some people see a lobster, some people see a bunny.”
What we were actually looking at, Barrett told me, was a bee. I couldn’t see it. But then she started clicking back and forth between that picture and a new one, which was very clearly a close-up of a bee’s body. Suddenly the grainy nonsense in the first picture snapped into bumblebee stripes. Now that I knew what I was looking at, I could see it, and for an instant everything I knew about bees flooded into my mind: their hum, their wings, their bumbling flight on a hot summer’s day, the taste of their honey. “Now,” Barrett said, “can you not see the bee? Every time you see this, you will always see the bee. Because right now your mind is adding information from your past experience to create the image of the bee.”
That, Barrett told me, is what the mind does with emotions. Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling. In other words, as Barrett put it to me, emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

So there’s no such thing as a basic emotion? It sounds crazy. But this is where all sorts of brain science is headed. Researchers once assumed that the brain stored specific memories, but now they’ve realized that there is no such stash to be found. Memories, the new science suggests, are actually reconstructed anew every time we access them, and appear to us a little differently each time, depending on what’s happened since. Vision works in a similar way. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.
In the spring of 2006, Barrett published a pair of controversial papers. The first, which appeared in the inaugural issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, compiled every argument and question she’d found during the previous 16 years that challenged the “natural-kind view”—her term for Ekman’s theory. “The natural-kind view has outlived its scientific value,” she declared, “and now presents a major obstacle to understanding what emotions are and how they work.” The second paper, which appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Review, sketched out a richer research agenda and promised to resolve the inconsistencies and address the problems that had emerged in the prior 50 years of emotion research.
The papers provoked strong reactions. In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist who studies positive emotions and has debated publicly with Barrett in the past. “There are a zillion data points on a perspective that conforms to Ekman, and the alternative has yet to be documented convincingly.” Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.

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The photographs above were used by Paul Ekman in the 1960s and 1970s as he conducted his pioneering cross-cultural studies of emotion. Subjects were shown the photographs and asked to match what they saw in them to a list of emotions, or stories about emotions. Ekman reported striking results: People all over the world matched the same faces to the same emotions, suggesting that we all express basic emotions in the same way, regardless of age, gender, or culture. From left, the emotions shown above, as described by Ekman, are anger, contempt (modeled by Ekman himself), disgust, surprise, sadness, happiness, and fear.

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But Barrett’s papers and her subsequent work have also attracted praise. According to the Stanford psychologist James Gross, they have made her “one of the most important contemporary figures in the field.” Michael Spivey, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, contends that Barrett is “almost single-handedly taking the field of emotion research into the 21st century.” In 2007, too, the National Institutes of Health unanimously awarded Barrett a Pioneer Grant, as part of an initiative aimed at funding high-risk-high-payoff ideas in science. Barrett received $3.9 million, to be used in her emotion studies however she saw fit. She is only the second psychologist ever to have won the prize.
For his part, Ekman likes to remain above the fray these days. “If you can show Ekman’s wrong,” he said when I asked him about Barrett and others who have attacked his ideas, “you’ll become famous. I’m not saying that’s their motive. I’m only describing the reality.”

Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group, a consulting firm that he still runs today, which has taught police departments, law-enforcement agencies, and intelligence-gathering services how to read faces for emotions. David Matsumoto, an Ekman protégé, has provided similar services to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Federal Judges, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and even to doctors at the Mayo Clinic through his own California-based company, Humintell, which he founded in 2009. Both Ekman and Matsumoto have created websites on which you can buy introductory face-reading kits for less than $30.
Ekman and his ideas, in other words, still have a powerful influence on society at large, and scientists in a variety of disciplines continue to rely on his research. But doubts are emerging. In 2010, for example, forensic psychologists at the University of British Columbia reported in Legal and Criminological Psychology that when they’d actually gone looking for the link between the microexpressions of liars and certain universal emotions (the kind of link upon which Ekman’s theory depends), they hadn’t been able to find it. The authors wrote, “We, like most everyone else, it seemed, presumed the firm empirical foundation of the validity of microexpressions in relation to deception. But in 2006, despite reading of anecdotal evidence, we were unable to find any published empirical research on the phenomenon.”
That same year, even the U.S. Government Accountability Office weighed in, releasing a report suggesting that SPOT, the TSA’s behavior-detection program, might have been launched without proper scientific confirmation that its underlying premise was valid. A subcommittee hearing and several follow-up reports later, the program’s status remains uncertain, despite $200 million that has been spent annually on it since 2003. “If governments are buying into notions that are not scientifically sound or empirically supported,” says Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who testified at the hearing, “then I think the money’s being wasted.”

Barrett recently decided to take on Ekman’s ideas directly, by sending a small research team to visit the isolated Himba tribe in Namibia, in southern Africa. The plan was this: The team, led by Maria Gendron, would do a study similar to Ekman’s original cross-cultural one, but without providing any of the special words or context-heavy stories that Ekman had used to guide his subjects’ answers. Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles. If emotional expressions are indeed universal, they reasoned, then the Himba would put all low-browed, tight-lipped expressions into an anger pile, all wrinkled-nose faces into a disgust pile, and so on.
It didn’t happen that way. The Himba sorted some of the faces in ways that aligned with Ekman’s theory: smiling faces went into one pile, wide-eyed fearful faces went into another, and affectless faces went mostly into a third. But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.
Barrett, Gendron, and two others wrote a paper based on this study, which Barrett considers one of her most important to date, and submitted it to Science this past December, with high hopes for its publication. “What we’re trying to do,” she told me, “is to just get people to pay attention to the fact that there’s a mountain of evidence that does not support the idea that facial expressions are universally recognized as emotional expressions.” That’s the crucial point, of course, because if we acknowledge that, then the entire edifice that Paul Ekman and others have been constructing for the past half-century comes tumbling down. And all sorts of things that we take for granted today—how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, how we practice psychology and psychiatry, how we do police work and gather intelligence—will have to change.

This past January, I visited Barrett at her home. She was tired. Two colleagues had just died in quick succession, and she’d gone to both of their memorials the week before. She was scheduled to fly out again in a couple of days for a debate at a psychology conference in New Orleans. And she’d just heard back from Science about the Namibia paper. The news wasn’t good: They’d rejected it.
“I felt fed up,” she told me, describing her reaction. “I just felt like, Why am I banging my head against a wall? Life is short. What the hell am I doing? Clearly people don’t give a shit about data, because if they did, I wouldn’t have this battle on my hands.” She paused. “I did feel that way for about 10 minutes. And then I took a step back and said, ‘Okay, I’ve seen reviews like this before.’”
Barrett showed me the feedback she’d received on the manuscript from two anonymous peer reviewers. One had been positive, but the other had written a scathing two-page response that had started by declaring the work “unjustified” and gone downhill from there. Barrett told me she suspected the second reviewer had misunderstood her statistical methods and had based several of his or her arguments on misrepresented sources. Nevertheless, she’s now adopted a philosophical stance toward it all. “Science is about persevering in the face of ambiguity and, oftentimes, adversity,” she says. “And the data, in the end, will point the way.”
It’s early days yet. Barrett’s theory is still only in its infancy. But other researchers are beginning to take up her ideas, sometimes in part, sometimes in full, and where the science will take us as it expands is impossible to predict. It’s even possible that Barrett will turn out to be wrong, as she herself acknowledges. “Every scientist has to face that,” she says. Still, if she is right, then perhaps the most important change we’ll need to make is in our own heads. If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.
“Every experience you have now is seeding your experience for the future,” Barrett told me. “Knowing that, would you choose to do what you’re doing now?” She paused a beat and looked me in the eye. “Well? Would you? You are the architect of your own experience.”


http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2013/06/25/emotions-facial-expressions-not-related/4/

How Do You Know When You Are In Love?

Different Types of Love: passive love and active love; love at first sight

Published on April 25, 2013 by Philippa Perry in How to Stay Sane

If you ask someone to describe what being in love feels like, they will describe something that sounds like sexual passion and desire tinged with obsession. As far as our genes are concerned, sexual desire is where it’s at, and it’s a strong drive, so after a brush with passion we might find ourselves saying, “I thought I was in love, but it wasn’t love - just lust.”And then there is the niggling difference between acting in a loving way versus being ‘in love’. The former is about being active. It encompasses what we mean when we say that being in a good relationship takes work. Whereas being ‘in love’ tends to sound passive, something we fall into, over which we have no control. Perhaps it even happens at first sight. Let me talk a little bit more about this ‘love at first sight’ phenomenon, because this is what being ‘in love’ is about for many people.

‘Love at first sight’, might be better described as ‘mutual positive transference’. Transference is something we all do: it is what happens when we make unconscious assumptions about the person before us based on our experience of people we have known in the past. We may have had a significant bonding experience with a carer from our infancy, maybe a parent, a grandparent, or a nursery school teacher, and later we may meet someone who looks at us in the same way, speaks with the same rhythms, or elicits the same feelings from us, and we may feel what we call ‘chemistry’. The original love object from the past may even have faded from conscious memory.
Consciously we may think that we prefer a certain type of person, but this is prejudice. Transference is not as conscious as that, but it can cause a feeling that is highly charged and one that we cannot help but notice.
But just because something feels charged or familiar, it does not follow that it is all good even if it feels ‘right’: it might just be familiar. This is why some of us have a pattern of falling for the same ‘wrong’ types.
Transference is indeed passive – and it’s probably why we talk of ‘falling’ in love. When we fall in love, we trip over transference. Sometimes we will fall on our feet but at other times, when reality intrudes, the positive transference fades and takes love with it. There are other factors that add to this falling in love feeling - unromantic things such as a complimentary immune system that we instinctively recognise via our olfactory systems, or facial symmetry which our most basic of instincts recognises as indicating general good health.
So how can we tell if it’s really love we’re feeling? If we get this charged sensation which combines obsession with sexual attraction, it is not necessarily because the person we love is a good person or the right one for us, it only means unconscious forces are at work forcing us to see them through a filter that sifts out inconvenient realities. Jane Austen recognised that goodness has very little to do with love. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, whilst wondering why Mr. Darcy fell for her says to him, “You knew no actual good of me — but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.”
It is entirely possible that this initial positive transference can turn into a deeper, more lasting love. When this happens, erotic love based in sexual attraction changes to mature love. This develops over a period of time between long-term couples and involves actively practising goodwill, commitment, compromise and understanding. This type of love is sometimes known as Pragma: it’s when the passivity of erotic transference turns into the active behaviours of listening, caring, dialogue, appreciation, mutual impact and priority. Actions backed up with commitment. Sure, a little of the initial positive transference may linger and it does love no harm.
Yet if we never experience the transference that makes people go dreamy eyed and rather boring company for anyone other than their beloved, we are only missing out on a trick our genes would have been playing on us: it does not preclude us from having a rich and fulfilling romantic relationship based on appreciation and action rather than on tripping up over transference. Arranged marriages can work and blossom, because of the commitment of both partners to act in loving ways.
We can feel an erotic charge that is also down to transference and decide in a truly loving way, not to act on it, but to stay with the person to whom we have previously committed. That is more far loving than acting on an impulse. I find it difficult to be overly sympathetic to betraying partners who justify themselves with excuses such as, “The force of our love was too strong to resist”. Yes, erotic transference is a strong charge but it has little to do with love.
There are other kinds of love and it is confusing for us because unlike the ancient greeks and romans, we have but one word for love, they were more explicit. Here are some examples:
Philia, which is a deep but usually non-sexual intimacy between close friends and family members. It can also manifest as a deep bond forged by people who have worked together or who have been through a dramatic or emotional experience together.
Ludus, which is a more playful form of affection found in fooling around and flirting.
If you feel love for all of humanity, a more generalised love, that is Agape.
In order to love another I believe we also need a type of love sometimes called Philautia, which is self love. This is not as selfish as it sounds. As Aristotle discovered, and as any psychotherapist will tell us, in order to care for others we need to be able to care about ourselves.
So love is not just a non-specific emotion that plays an elusive game with us. It is not merely something we passively fall into. It can consist of many things, from the erotic to the pragmatic. It can also be deeply intimate yet non-sexual, as the ancients described Philia. It can be flirty, fun and Ludic, or our love can feel universal, or Agapic.
Love is not static. Feelings of love come and go just like feelings of sadness or happiness. It is commitment that does not waver. The old cliché, ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’ describes a transition from one type of love to another. What it really means is ‘I’m moving on because I want to stay with erotic love and am not yet ready for pragmatic love’. But when we are ready for more than eroticism plus obsession we can feed affection and sexual feeling with the more rewarding worlds of pragmatic and philiatic love.
Here is a short film of Roman Krznaric, my colleague at The School of Life talking more on this subject.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-stay-sane/201304/how-do-you-know-when-you-are-in-love

Why Are Cellphones so Annoying?

New evidence on how our brains react.

Published on March 19, 2013 by Elizabeth Wagele in The Career Within You

Cartoon by Elizabeth Wagele

I read an interesting article in the NY Times about the reasons people talking loudly on cell phones are so annoying (March 14, 2013). The newspaper came the same day I had been especially irritated in the drug store by the man in front of me in line. He was talking to his friend about playing soccer and several other things the whole time his transaction with the clerk took place, talking extremely loudly so those at the opposite end of the huge store could hear every word.
My interpretation of why this sort of thing is so annoying includes:
• the simple facts of too much noise and the person’s insensitivity
• the unconscious attitude of the guy. He seemed to have no idea how loud he was or how boring his intrusion into our psyches was to us. His unconsciousness about what he was doing and how it was affecting people bordered on something obscene. I thought he shouldn’t be out doing this in public but needed to be behind closed doors, out of hearing and out of sight.

 The article had another interpretation, however. Author Douglas Quenqua wrote, “…Scientists have found another piece of evidence (besides that we have to reread what we’re reading 12 times when someone is using a cell phone sitting next to us on a bus) that overheard cell-phone conversations are far more distracting and annoying than a dialogue between two people nearby. Talking to someone who is not there hijacks the cognitive function of the bystanders. In other words, we want to fill in the missing part of the conversation when we only hear one side of it.

There’s even a word for this type of over-hearing: A one-sided dialogue is called a halfalogue. When we’re stuck near one of these we feel trapped and we have a stress response to it. We’re constantly forced to try to predict what’s going to happen next.”

Researchers also found out that we think these halfologues are really louder than they are. “When you can’t not pay attention to a sound, it seems louder.” The article goes on, “Though surveys have repeatedly placed public cellphone conversations at the top of Americans’ pet peeves, there are indications that the problem is easing. In 2006, 82 percent of Americans said they were at least occasionally annoyed by cellphone conversations in public. In 2012, that number dropped to 74 percent. ‘People are starting to recognize that it’s really rude to force other people to listen to your conversation.’”

May this trend continue!

For Famous Enneagram types, http://www.wagele.com/Famous.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-career-within-you/201303/why-are-cellphones-so-annoying

Art and the Clinical Encounter

How is psychoanalysis like making art?

Published on April 5, 2013 by Molly S. Castelloe, Ph.D. in The Me in We

 

How is practicing psychoanalysis like being an artist? In Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art, Routledge, 2012) Danielle Knafo elaborates this connection with thoughtful care and insight. For inspiration she calls on her own childhood immigration from French Morocco to Dutch Pennsylvania, which required she creatively bridge the world of “couscous and b’stilla” and “funnel cakes and shoo-fly pie” (p. xvii).
For Knafo, psychoanalysis takes the form of dance because it seeks movement, action, and release – the dissemination of unconscious energies. It also engages stillness and interludes of incubation. But beginning with Breuer and Freud's study of women's bodies that were physically stuck, sometimes literally, psychoanalytic healing animates places in the flesh cut-off from embodiment.

The first half of the book discusses the artistic components of clinical practice beginning with three forms of unconscious expression: free association, (integral to Surrealism), transference-countertransference, and dream making. Knafo updates the concept of "regression," too often misunderstood, she argues, highlighting its various purposes "in the service of art" as well as ego (p. 23).

Data is gathered from extensive personal interviews the author conducted with artists and her own clinical research. Knafo describes Kasia, a second-generation holocaust survivor who used the consulting room as a "concentration camp," screaming through sessions in which Knafo felt more the vibration than heard her patient's words (p. 86). At home Kasia, a photographer, hung her pictures with the image side turned to the wall. The author describes an arduous therapeutic journey through which anger became agency and her analysand gained freedom through “imaginatively created embodied images” (p. 87).

Knafo suggests that collective catastrophe, such as holocausts, need be re-presented, however partial, even though the aesthetic experience risks retraumatization and assault on the viewer. She cites concerns about exploiting the pain of victims by affording aesthetic pleasure. Yet pleasure does not preclude learning. Knafo puts it this way: aesthetic recreations of massive trauma induce in the spectator "sensations felt by the artists, themselves, and thereby have viewers share the psychological burden as well as ethical responsibility of containing the trauma. . . artists possess the gift of using aesthetic forms to present us with these unpalatable truths and help us digest them" (p. 88). Repetitions of trauma, in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis, are remade as shards of symbolization struggle to find gentler form.

Knafo asks us to consider: death is something that people deny more than anything else. Although conscious of mortality, people dissociate from the actuality of their own demise (not only the fact of it but its literal context: the possibilities of how, when, where). If we could be more accepting of our own attitudes about death could we more fully register our near-death experiences and thus "transcend our fear and clinging?" (p. 65).

The second half of the book studies the work of artists, among which Knafo includes Freud’s “Dream of the Three Fates” and pieces by Egon Schiele, David Lynch, Bruno Schulz and Ana Mendieta. Although referencing the performance work of artists such as Mendieta, Orlan, and Marina Abramović, Knafo overlooks the intriguing parallel between psychoanalysis and the theatrical Avant-Garde. Both Movements rely on the body as primary instrument, use autobiography explicitly, and question the function of the frame.
Knafo addresses the frame in her discussion of Michal Heiman's work, a prominent contemporary Israeli artist who films herself looking through a rear-view car mirror as she drives to Jerusalem. The use of a second frame, the mirror, calls attention to filmmaking as a mirroring process. Jean Luc-Godard, once said that an honest film would merely “show a camera filming itself in a mirror.” (Stam, 59) An honest life is the face inside the mirror gazing back at the lens. In this instance, it is one precariously poised between life and death -- the spectator worries Heiman could run off the road! This work, Mirror Test, (2001), viscerally conveys the political anxiety and violence that Heiman inhabits daily, exemplifying what Knafo describes as “art in an age of terror” (p. 76).

"Leben? Order Theater?" (Life? or Theater?)

Reframing was also imperative to the psychic and spiritual survival of painter Charlotte Salomon who descended from a line of family suicides and was murdered in Auschwitz at age 26 when she was five months pregnant. Salomon's exquisite series of pictures Leben? Order Theater? (Life? or Theater?) (1940-42) wrests beauty from doom by recontexualizing it.

In Salomon's final self-portrait, the artist kneels on the beach painting a transparent canvas held in her lap. The composition blurs the distinction between sexualities, between life and art. Such “boundary fluidity” between inside/outside, masculine/feminine is a "hallmark of creativity," asserts Knafo (p. 6). In her forward-thinking work, Knafo expands the limits therapeutic intervention. Psychoanalysis, like dance, is messy and demands the courage of uncertainty. But when this pas de deux remains open in choreography it can lead to creative transcendence.

REFERENCE
Stam, Robert. (1992). Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201304/art-and-the-clinical-encounter