Vamık Volkan

Vamık D. Volkan (born 1932 in Lefkoşa, Cyprus) is a Turkish Cypriot Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, D.C. He is the President Emeritus of International Dialogue Initiative (IDI).

Vamık D. Volkan, M.D., DFLAPA, FACPsa, is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia and an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, DC. During his thirty nine years at the University of Virginia Dr. Volkan was the Medical Director of the University’s Blue Ridge Hospital for eighteen years. A year after his 2002 retirement Dr.Volkan became the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts and he has spent three to six months there each year for ten years.

In the early 1980s Dr. Volkan was a member and later the chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs. This committee brought influential Israelis, Egyptians and Palestinians for unofficial negotiations. In 1987, Dr. Volkan established the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at the School of Medicine, University of Virginia. 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. The CSMHI's faculty included experts in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology, diplomacy, history, political science, and environmental policy. In 1987 the Soviet Duma signed a contract with the CSMHI to examine existing difficulties between the Soviet Union and United States. Later the CSMHI members worked in the Baltic Republics, Kuwait, Albania, former Yugoslavia, Georgia, South Ossetia, Turkey, Greece, and elsewhere. Dr. Volkan founded the CSMHI’s journal, Mind & Human Interaction, which examined the relationship between psychoanalysis and history, political science and other fields.

Dr. Volkan was a member of the International Negotiation Network (INN) under the directorship of the former President Jimmy Carter (1989-2000) and also a member of the Working Group on Terror and Terrorism, International Psychoanalytic Association. He was a Temporary Consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Albania and Macedonia. 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 also was honored on several occasions by being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Letters of support were sent from 27 countries.

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