News (Psycho)analysis: On Turkey, Trauma, and the Armenian Genocide
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. [Read more]
