Free Web Hosting Provider - Web Hosting - E-commerce - High Speed Internet - Free Web Page

The main topic of the psychology workshop arranged during the Holocaust meeting held in London University's SOAS center last weekend, was the Armenian incidents. I will try to write something on this extremely complicated subject which is hard to explain and is on the borders or even on the horizon of human sciences.

Let's put aside the historical, political and financial sides of the issue and 'who is right, who is wrong' approach and let's try to look at it as human beings from the standpoint of the Armenians. The majority of the Armenians was subjected to relocation between 1915-1916. Families were dispersed. Wealth vanished. People died or were killed. The remaining miserable mass took shelter in foreign countries. There is no doubt that the incidents were full of personal tragedies.

It is natural for the people who faced this disaster, to hate us. Many Turks, who were expelled from the Balkans and the Caucasus to Anatolia in a similar way, must have felt similar feelings. But these Turks did not transmit their pain to the following generations. They raised their children in a forward-looking manner since they were contented with the significant portion of the land left in their hands although they lost the places they called homeland. On the other hand, the Armenians lost almost their entire homeland except a little portion. That's why it may be understood why they were stuck in their past and losses.

The part that cannot be understood is important in terms of Turco-Armenian relations. According to a panelist of the meeting Mr. L. Shirinian, the trauma of the Armenians still continues since the Turks do not recognize the genocide. Our denial of the genocide pulls them so much into the past that they cannot return to the future. Prof. Dadrian also said similar things on this issue. It means that as long as we do not recognize the genocide, it is impossible for the Armenians to put the past behind and look to the future. I do not know of any other example for the depth of dependence of a society on its enemy, if I may say so, to become normalized. Such a dependence may stem from Armenians' attribution to Turkey of an identity of a 'father' who did wrong to his child instead of protecting him as expected. And obviously this is not compatible with Turks' being a hate object of the Armenians.

At this point, memory problem arises. What the first generation, which was subjected to relocation, told to the following generations, constitutes the basis for genocide claims. The memory of this generation depends on the spontaneous experience. But the third generation, who received the bitter memories transmitted orally, should imagine the incidents in their minds. In other words, interiorizing the pain of the first generation, the third generation has to reconstruct the incidents in their imagination that caused this pain. At the meeting it was said that people could be very creative in this respect. As a result, "every Armenian became his or her own historian".

Commenting on this point, a British psychoanalyst pointed out that the humans have a genetical memory, too. The savagery happened during the evolution lives silently in the depths of our unconscious and leads us to exaggerate the memories of the disasters we faced in our lives by contaminating them. If this is true, it is hardly possible for the Turks to accept the responsibility of such an exaggerated past and "save" the Armenians.

An old British professor voiced in a very human terms that this psychology of the Armenians would negatively affect their social dynamism. It was felt that the participants of the panel understood the problem but were helpless to think of a solution.

Another speaker of the Panel Dr. D. Calonne indicated that grandmother figure was also important in the writings of Saroyan, Najarian and Balakian, as it was in Alishan's poems. The grandmother was the factor that transmitted the disaster to the following generations and thus establishing a link with the past. The grandmother was "mad as her people's history". Her madness passed onto her grandson. Calonne noted that the grandmother gained the stature of "Magna Mater" as explained in the book titled "The Great Mother" by Erich Neumann. Certain Jungians claim that this pre-monetheistic figure reflected a very regressive characteristic and was close to madness.