Last Friday the New York Times pub­lished a sur­pris­ing arti­cle by Sab­rina Tav­ernise and Sebnem Arsu. Head­lined “Inside Turkey’s Psyche: Trau­matic Issues Trou­ble a Nation’s Sense of Its Identity,” the arti­cle came on the heels of a House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives com­mit­tee vote that con­demned the mass killings of Arme­ni­ans in 1915 as geno­cide. The arti­cle was pack­aged under a “News Analysis” over­line, but “News Psychoanalysis” would have been more appropriate.

Tav­ernise and Arsu start by asking the question:

If most of the rest of the world argues that the Ottoman gov­ern­ment tried to exter­mi­nate its Armen­ian pop­u­la­tion, why does Turkey disagree?

Their answer, they say, “is hidden deep inside the Turk­ish psyche.” It begins with the sug­ges­tion that the con­struc­tion of the new Turk­ish state after World War I required the cre­ation of a new Turk­ish cit­i­zen. In writer Ali Bayramoglu’s words, “The iden­tity of a Turk was very much an engi­neered one in order to form a uni­fied nation.” Tav­ernise and Arsu then argue that this new Turk­ish iden­tity “was built on a painful foundation.” They quote soci­ol­o­gist Fehat Kentel, who read­ily describes this this for­ma­tion as “trau­matic.”

As the words I’ve ital­i­cized sug­gest, Tav­ernise and Arsu put forth a deeply psy­cho­an­a­lytic inter­pre­ta­tion of Turk­ish his­tory.