A number of events in my personal and professional life played a significant role in my establishing the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) in 2007. I was born to Turkish parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus when it was a British colony. During my childhood there, it was an anxious time for the adults around me, as they anticipated a Nazi airborne invasion, although in the end it never came. I studied medicine in Turkey, and in 1957 went to the United States as a new physician to be trained as a psychiatrist. It became my home. Prior to my arrival in the US, ethnic conflict between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks had begun. After only fourth months in my new country, I learned that my roommate from my medical school days had gone to Cyprus from Turkey to visit his ailing mother and had been shot to death by a Greek terrorist. A few years later, in 1961, now a psychiatrist, I became a staff member of Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for two years. At that time Cherry Hospital was a segregated place, only for African-Americans with mental problems. Hearing these patients’ stories, I emotionally recognized the horrible influence of racism on those subjected to it.
Facing the Other—those with a different large-group identity who might frighten or even kill you, or perceive you as less than a human being—started very early for me. It was certainly the major factor for my involvement in international relations. In November, 1977, the then president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, went to Israel and, speaking at the Knesset, declared that seventy percent of the problems involving Arabs and Israelis could be ascribed to a psychological wall between the opposing parties. This event crystalized something for me and opened a door for my participation in unofficial diplomatic dialogues between Israelis and Egyptians over the next six years. Later I brought together a multidisciplinary team, who worked with unofficial representatives of opposing large groups, such as Americans-Soviets, Russians-Estonians, Georgians-South Ossetians, Croats-Serbs, Turks-Greeks, for series of talks aimed at mutual understanding and more peaceful co-existence. I learned that, behind observable factors such as political, economic and legal ones, the central psychological factor in starting and keeping alive large-group conflicts is the protection and maintenance of large-group identity.
There are different kinds of large-group identity. The first type begins in childhood and exists throughout the world. It is the end-result of myths and realities of common beginnings, historical continuities, geographical realities, and other shared linguistic, societal, religious, cultural and historical factors. In everyday language, subjective experience of such large-group identities is expressed in terms such as “We are Apache, we are Catalan, we are Lithuanian Jews, we are Polish, we are Sunni Muslims, we are Communists.”
Large-group identity, in the second sense, manifests itself when individuals are adults. Tens of thousands or millions of followers of a political party or employees of a huge international corporation can be imagined as belonging to this type of large group. However, followers of political parties or employees of corporations do not lose the large-group identity they developed in childhood. Religious cults such as Branch Davidians and terrorist organizations such as ISIS, on the other hand, do represent psychologically significant large groups that evolve during adulthood. Members of such organizations lose the moral attitudes, the superego-imposed restrictions, they acquired as children. They become representatives of the large groups they join as adults and perceive their actions as duty, to protect or bring attention to their newly acquired large-group identity.
When a conflict occurs between a large group – whether from childhood or adulthood – and the Other, whoever that may be, certain ideological characteristics regularly become inflamed. The first of these is the maintenance of non-sameness. Dehumanization of the Other is not simply based on realistic considerations when the Other actually performs inhuman acts; it is a response to a large group’s need to keep alive the principle of not being like the enemy Other. The second characteristic reflects the need to maintain a psychological border between large groups in conflict. Although the maintenance of physical borders has always been vital to international relationships, closer examination indicates that it is far more critical to have an effective psychological border than a simply physical one. The third characteristic that comes into play is purification, which involves purging elements, sometimes even people, who are perceived as foreign and not under the umbrella of the large group’s identity. Also, mental images of old historical events, which I named “chosen glories” and “chosen traumas,” and old cultural amplifiers are recalled to support large-group identity. This causes a time collapse, emotionally connecting the present conflict with historical ones. The influence of all of these principles, which always have the potential to lead to splits in societies, might remain benign or become malignant depending on circumstances, perhaps especially the personality of a political leader.
In large-group histories we see the appearance of the question, “Who are we now?” following dynamic historical events such as war, revolution, a humiliating economic trauma, or the coming to power of, or loss of, a charismatic reparative or destructive leader. Incredible advances – in communication, signal and photographic intelligence, travel technologies, and borderless financial markets – have made people with different large-group identities interact to a greater degree and with greater speed. Such developments, alongside their positive aspects, have produced confrontations, and have faced people world-wide with the “Who are we now?” question . Current refugee crises, extreme religious fundamentalism and terrorist attacks have forced us to enter a “Who are we now” civilization. Deniz Ülke Arıboğan, a member of IDI, in her new book, describes how building walls to protect large-group identity has greatly increased and led to a “world with walls.” The preoccupation with building a wall between the United States and Mexico is well known. Members of the IDI, with eight large-group identities, are succeeding in making psychological walls among themselves permeable. They hope to create a model for understanding the Other and helping to prevent the evolution of the kind of dangerous interactions between large groups we see in so many parts of the world today.
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