From Chosen Trauma to Depolarization
Addressing Toxic Polarization in Groups Using the Work of Vamik Volkan
By Sue Kolod
Battle of Kosovo by Adam Stefanovic (1870) depicts a key moment of suffering and defeat in Serbian national consciousness—what Vamik Volkan calls a chosen trauma. The concept is explored in the film Blind Trust, directed by Molly Castelloe.
Every time my grandmother came to visit, she would tell me the story about a mother bird and her baby birds. The mother bird went out to find food for the babies. When she left, a large cat with long sharp claws grabbed the nest, tore the birds apart, and ate them all. When the mother bird returned, she was horrified and grief-stricken to see that they had been killed by the big cat.
The mother bird vowed to build a nest where new baby birds would be protected. She found a rose bush with sharp thorns, laid her eggs, and soon had a new flock of baby birds. Again, she left the babies to find food. The big cat tried to get the baby birds, but this time the rose bush scratched the cat and tore at the cat so badly that he retreated in a very wounded bloody state and never tried to attack the babies again. The story ends happily with mother returning to healthy babies.
Although my grandmother never stated explicitly that the story was an allegory for Israel, I always knew that at some level. My grandparents were Zionists and had longed to emigrate to Palestine. In 1933 my grandmother succeeded in moving the family there. They lived there for one year but for some reason decided to return to the United States. On the way home to Cleveland, Ohio, they stopped in Poland and met my mother’s grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins, most of whom were later murdered by the Nazis. The ones who survived escaped to the United States or Israel.
The stories we tell about such collective traumas can pull us together as groups but also divide groups against each other. Psychoanalysis can help show how this dynamic works and why it matters.
Chosen Trauma
In the documentary film Blind Trust (2022), psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan defines chosen trauma as “the shared mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered at the hand of an enemy. This chosen trauma can be reactivated when the group’s identity and survival is threatened.” Its corollary, “chosen glory,” refers to events in the past that represent the ascendancy of the group such as winning a war or expanding an empire.
After I watched the film, it occurred to me that the Holocaust was my chosen trauma, while the War of Independence in Israel was my chosen glory. Having had this realization, it seemed me that the Palestinian chosen trauma was the “Nakba,” the Arab word for catastrophe. What I had called “the War of Independence” and the mass deportations that followed was Nakba to the Palestinians. I could easily imagine a Palestinian grandmother telling her grandchildren allegories about the Nakba just as my grandmother told me an allegory about the Holocaust and Israel.
I am aware that the term “chosen” could feel dismissive, as Israelis and Palestinians have experienced unthinkable horrors they did not choose. The choice here is not to undergo the trauma but to memorialize it in a certain way. In fact, as Dr. Volkan clarified in a January 2025 meeting I helped organize, he reserves the term “chosen trauma” for long-past events with no remaining survivors. Therefore, the Holocaust and Nakba are more appropriately described as objects of “unfinished mourning,” in Volkan’s vocabulary.
My point is that I believe Volkan’s related concepts of chosen trauma and unfinished mourning can be useful in developing the capacity and curiosity to listen to opposing, disturbing views of the other.
Volkan gives an example of a proper chosen trauma: On June 28, 1389, the Serbians lost the Battle of Kosovo to the Ottoman Turks, leading to the downfall of their medieval kingdom—or so the story goes. Historical details about the battle are not well established, and other events may have been more important in regional shifts of power at the time. Still, the event is seared into the memory of Serbians even today. The Serbian Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of St. Vitus, or Vidovdan in Serbian, on June 28. The holiday is a national and religious feast day that honors Saint Prince Lazar and the Serbian martyrs who died in the battle. The myth of the battle acquired new meanings and importance during the rise of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s when Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic reactivated the trauma as a rallying cry for Serbian society to rise up against its Muslim population, imagined as stand-ins for the Ottoman Turks.
Volkan himself is a Turkish Cypriot based in the United States. He applies the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious, projection, group regression, and identity to international conflicts. He has made the point, echoing the words of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, that 70% of all problems in the Mideast were psychological.
Volkan defines large group identity as occurring within a group of people who share sentiment, culture, history, food. The members of the group may never actually have met each other, but they share the same emotions and points of view based on their shared history, and particularly their shared mourning. We are defined, he notes, by how we mourn.
When trauma occurs on a massive scale, the large group shares its mourning. Monuments are built to commemorate events such as the World Wars, the Vietnam War, 9/11. These monuments are symbolic, concrete representations of the trauma that create a place where members of the large group can mourn together. Volkan specifies that some monuments are “hot” because mourning is still going on, has not taken place or has not been completed. Volkan says that if large group trauma is not understood, diplomacy will fail, and the trauma will continue in the next generation. This is called the “transgenerational transmission of trauma.”
Throughout the documentary, the director and producer of the film, Molly Castelloe, interviews Volkan and his colleague Gerald Fromm. These interviews illuminate how the theories Volkan developed came from his own experiences and family relationships. Volkan was a university student when the British left Cypress and Greeks and Turks started fighting. Attempts to share power and reconcile different visions for the future of the country had broken down. In a news clip on television, he watched his family running from the violence. Although his family members survived, seeing them fleeing for their lives was deeply traumatizing to him and led to his conclusion that international diplomacy needs a new language and new theories to understand conflicts in the 21st century. “Globalization and mass migration have changed the world, and likewise, diplomacy has to change.”
The Depolarization Project
In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, I chaired a panel on mask refusal and conspiracy theories, at the IPA Congress that was supposed to have taken place in Vancouver but due to travel restrictions, took place remotely. The idea for the panel came from the experience of one of our panelists, Chris Heath, a psychoanalyst from Dallas. He told me about an incident which had occurred during a family trip to a small town outside of Dallas. He, his wife, and teenage daughter got out of their car at a shopping center, all wearing masks. A middle-aged white man walked all the way across a large parking lot, came up to his daughter, and intentionally coughed in her face. We asked ourselves, “Why would someone do that?”
During the Q and A segment, several people remarked that psychoanalysis has much to offer to alleviate the toxic polarization that had been increasing at an alarming pace in the US. When pressed, none of the audience members were able to articulate how psychoanalysis could help.
Dr. Health and I decided to form a group for the purpose of studying toxic polarization in small groups. We called it the Depolarization Project. We are a diverse group; half are psychoanalysts and the other half come from fields such as architecture, law, and social media. We’re diverse in age, religion, and political perspectives and frequently disagree with one another. We read articles from a variety of disciplines such as behavioral economics, law, and social psychology, in addition to psychoanalysis, on how toxic polarization develops and spreads. Most importantly, we pay close attention to how polarization might be arising within the group itself.
Depolarization is an antidote to toxic polarization, which is defined as a state of intense, chronic polarization marked by high levels of loyalty to a person’s ingroup and contempt or even hate for outgroups. Toxic polarization limits our ability to humanize and engage with political opponents. Fueled by social media, the conditions of the pandemic, and authoritarian governments, it has become a defining characteristic of our zeitgeist.
Although psychoanalytic training would suggest that analysts are uniquely prepared to address polarization and to lessen its impact, that is not what we have seen within large-group settings.
In fact, psychoanalysts seem prone to polarization, especially on psychoanalytic listservs—a form of digital communication that can quickly become toxic.
“The Public Conversations Project […] healed splitting, reduced binary thinking, and allowed for more nuanced and ambivalent views.”
Listserv Wars
The rupture that occurred at the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) in March of 2023 is one of the most extreme examples. The conflict was exacerbated by attacks and counterattacks on the APSA listserv, which resulted in the resignation of President Kerry Sulkowicz. Accusations—of racism on one side and anti-Semitism on the other—inflamed the discussion. Polarization spread like wildfire. At the same time, there seemed to be little room for actual dialogue.
But October 7, 2023, brought polarization within our field to an entirely different level. See this example from a progressive psychoanalytic listserv that had, until October 7, been able to avoid the kinds of polarization seen on other listservs such as those maintained by APsA and by APA Division 39. Names have been changed, and this is a digest of a longer thread.
Ariel on 10/8: Dear colleagues, I am beside myself with grief, so this will be short and perhaps ineloquent. In light of the traumatic horrors that have unfolded and are still occurring in Israel, I am writing to encourage your emergency support for Israelis in your personal and professional community. I also encourage everyone to reach out to your fellow Jewish and Israeli colleagues with the understanding that we are overwhelmed by our own grief and fear and worried for those who are reaching out to us. With great sadness, Ariel
Malik on 10/9: Let’s be clear, Israel has more than enough psychotherapists. They’ll be okay. Israel is not the victim here. I won’t sit here silently while Israel commits genocide and watch a listserv I’m on recruit support for the settler colonial population. If you want to do your Israeli patients a service, tell them to leave Israel and stop participating in a violent settler colonial project.
David: With the exception of “leave Israel”— if that implies, as I think it does, that Israel should no longer exist— I agree completely with this statement.
Malik: Well then David you missed the crucial part. Malik
Ahmed: Do see the Israeli patients, of course. No one is advocating withholding care. If you really care for them, however, ask them to give up their colonizer status and leave the setter colonial structure of Israel. Free Palestine.
Malik: don’t see how one can help them in the capacity of a therapist. This goes beyond therapy. No therapy in my view can cure a material state of unfreedom and genocide. Breaking out, which is what is happening now, at enormous cost, is the only form of therapy, if one could even call it that. Malik
Ariel: What do you mean by “breaking out”? Are you calling murder and torture a therapy? I don’t want to continue this conversation with you. If the moderators and members of this community will not rise to the occasion and limit this destructive expression of evil, I am leaving this listserv. Shaking with tears, Ariel
Sometimes dialogue is just not possible. But without dialogue, the “other side” becomes increasingly vilified, and their views exaggerated. In The New York Times, psychologist Dr. Richard Perloff noted that in these situations, a spiral of silence develops, in which people with nuanced views on both sides of the issue, perceiving their opinions are in the minority, become reluctant to speak out. What results are simple tropes and cartoonish stereotypes that further polarize the two sides. Many analysts have concluded that we should avoid discussing polarized issues with each other because it is too disturbing.
If psychoanalysts can’t talk to each other about their passionately held views and listen to each other, who can?
The Boston Public Conversation Project
Dorothy Holmes, chair of APsA’s Holmes Commission on Racial Equality, noted, “High-level dialogue that is necessary to help resolve toxic polarization may require predialogue in terms of assessing and addressing the degree to which polarized individuals or groups are coming from the paranoid-schizoid position” (splitting and projection).
The Boston Public Conversation Project provides an excellent example of what I think Holmes might mean by predialogue. This project was initiated in Boston to address polarization on abortion that had become violent when a shooter wounded three people and killed the receptionist in one abortion clinic and injured two and killed one person in another.
Six women who were leaders in their communities and very distressed by the situation, three pro-life and three pro-choice, met together for five and a half years. The meetings were private and confidential because the women feared that those in their own camp would be strongly opposed to their “speaking with the enemy” and see their dialogue as a betrayal. At the first meeting, ground rules were established: no interrupting or personal attacks. All agreed that the meetings would be completely confidential unless everyone agreed on how to go public.
They found that toning down the rhetoric was critical. At the start of their meetings, the six women grappled with clashes over language. How do you refer to what grows and develops in a pregnant woman’s womb? The pro-choice women couldn’t agree to “unborn baby,” and the pro-life women would not accept “fetus.” They finally came to a consensus, uneasily and for the sake of moving forward, to “human fetus.” Over time, it became apparent that for the pro-life women, life itself was (and is) more important than the quality of life, which the pro-choice women felt to be the preeminent value.
Importantly, they found some significant areas of overlap: prevention of teen pregnancy; expanding options for adoption; addressing situations in which a woman might feel she is being coerced into having an abortion.
Although the Public Conversations Project did not directly involve psychoanalysts, its aim was deeply psychoanalytic in the sense that it healed splitting, reduced binary thinking, and allowed for more nuanced and ambivalent views.
The Public Conversations Project focused on abortion, but these ground rules could be used to address other hot-button issues that divide people. As the world becomes increasingly polarized and people are unable to talk to each other, this divide increases the sense of danger and insecurity that leads to more splitting and polarization.
What did the Public Conversations Project accomplish? Stereotypes they had brought to the dialogue, in some cases unconscious, softened. The dialogue experience altered the way they interacted with people of different perspectives. They developed greater understanding of the roots of others’ viewpoints and a profound respect for the integrity and humanity of members on both poles of the issue. They concluded that the dialogue initiative had achieved its primary goal: de-escalation of the volatile and divisive climate surrounding public debate about abortion.
The Thinking Lab: Volkan’s Work as a Teaching Tool
Returning to Volkan: The film Blind Trust has made me feel more optimistic that psychoanalysis has something to offer to alleviate toxic polarization. The film was particularly compelling to a group of 12 psychoanalysts from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) who were living in situations of war or oppression in places such as Belarus, Ukraine, India, Iran, Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey. The members of this “Thinking Lab” found the concept of chosen trauma to be illuminating. They wanted to share Blind Trust with other members of their psychoanalytic community. In honor of Juneteenth 2024, the film was available free of charge.
As we shared memories and impressions in the Thinking Lab, each participant recalled events in their family histories which contributed to and helped form their large group identities. In many ways, the concepts of large group identity, chosen trauma, and unfinished mourning allowed group members to contact their own family histories which may have been dissociated or disavowed. As with countertransference analysis, an exploration of one’s chosen traumas and large group identity can be illuminating. Such an exploration allowed group members greater freedom to tolerate painful affects and to encounter the views of the other.
Blind Trust (2022), directed by Molly Castelloe, can be streamed online for $18 (one week’s access), and the DVD is available for purchase or rent.
Sue Kolod, PhD, is president-elect of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC). She is a supervising and training analyst at the William Alanson White Institute and coleads a study group on polarization called the Depolarization Project.
Published April 2025