Vamı k D. Volkan, M.D. 

Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, 

University of Virginia;  

and Training and Supervising Analyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, DC, USA 

The personalities of our political leaders, in a general sense but not necessarily a psychoanalytic sense, have always been scrutinized, especially during elections, crises or scandals. At present Bill Clinton’s repeated sexual affairs and Slobodan Milosević’s repeated efforts to inflame malignant Serbian nationalism have increased interest in understanding a political leader’s personality and its role in determining decisions and behavior. Over the course of an adult individual’s lifetime, he or she exhibits habitual behavior and thought patterns, emotional expressions, modes of speech and bodily gestures which can be observed by others. Because political leaders spend a great deal of time in the public eye, and have little choice but to allow much of their life and personal habitual patterns to be available to everyone through the media, attempts are sometimes made to analyze their personality.  

The term “personality” describes the observable and predicable repetitions that an individual consciously and unconsciously utilizes under ordinary circumstances to “maintain a stable reciprocal relationship between the individual and his or her environment. Therefore, personality is associated with self-regulatory and environment-altering ego functions that an individual uses regularly to maintain both internal (intrapsychic) and interpersonal harmony” (Volkan et al., 1998, p. 152). Two additional concepts, temperament and character , are usually included under the umbrella of personality. Temperament refers to genetically and constitutionally determined affectomotor tendencies. Character is formed by the modes an individual utilizes to reconcile intrapsychic conflicts during developmental years. When temperament and character are combined, they produce adult personality.  

The concept of personality, however, is not the same as identity—the latter is not observed by others, but instead is sensed only by a specific individual. Identity refers to an individual’s inner sense of sameness, a continuity of personalized past, present and future, and stable body and gender images (Erikson, 1950; Akhtar, 1992). The term personality should also be differentiated from “self-representation” — another term of more recent use that refers to a psychoanalyst’s metapsychological description of how his or her patient’s self-organization (or personality organization) has developed and how it theoretically relates to object representations as well as id demands, ego functions and superego influences. 

In our clinical work we observe various types of personalities and name them obsessive, narcissistic , depressive and so on. For example, when we see a patient who is habitually dogmatic, opinionated, ambivalent, and “clean,” and exhibits stiff and rigid gestures and cannot freely express emotions, we say that this patient has an obsessive personality. Most people, however, possess aspects of different personality characteristics and it is difficult to classify their predictable behavior, thought and emotional patterns as strictly one type or another. When such patterns are predictable, exaggerated, maladaptive, and cause interpersonal problems, we use the term “personality disorder,” which, like personality, is ego-syntonic. The individual does not recognize their own part in causing interpersonal problems, or the role of their own personality in such conflicts.  

For example, a “routine” obsessional personality evolves into a “disorder” when the patient exhibits ambivalence to such a degree that he or she constantly frustrates others or cannot complete his or her own tasks. A person with obsessive personality disorder also keeps his or her emotions under control, but on occasion loses control in aggressive and inappropriate outbursts that cause further interpersonal conflicts. He or she is like a chronically constipated person who suddenly has an explosive bowel movement. I use this anal analogy because, through clinical work dating back to Freud (1905) and Abraham (1921), we have become aware of the anal fixations of the obsessional personality.  

 

A Political Leader’s Personality 

The personality of a political leader plays a crucial role in his or her attempts to maintain a stable relationship both with those who are in his or her immediate “entourage” and with the much larger group of people who comprise his or her “followers.” The leader-follower relationship is a “two-way” street: it is influenced and determined by the leader’s personality and from the followers’ shared conscious and unconscious wishes and needs (Volkan, 1980, 1988, 1999a, Volkan and Itzkowitz, 1984).  

Political science professor James MacGregor Burns (1984) identified two types of leaders:  transactional and transforming . The transactional leader depends on and in fact thrives on bargaining, manipulating, accommodating, and compromising within a given system. He or she acts according to political polls and national “climate” and follows existing societal sentiments, becoming a spokesperson for them. On the other hand, a transforming leader “responds to fundamental human needs and wants, hopes and expectations” and may “transcend and even seek to reconstruct the political system, rather than simply operating within it” (Burns, 1984, p. 16). In this we hear an echo of Weber’s (1923) classic description of charismatic leaders. 

In a stable democracy that is not experiencing economic, military and political stress, the personality of a transactional leader typically is not of critical importance, and even a transforming leader will not cause fundamental changes in society or initiate drastically different policies. The formal and informal systems of “checks and balances” in a well-functioning democracy prevent a leader’s habitual ways of behaving and feeling from exerting undue influence over government and the governed. Even when many followers are excited about a transforming leader’s personality, behavior, and agenda, and identify with them, changes that may result typically are not drastic.  

Under certain circumstances, however, the personality of a political leader can influence outcomes or policies, and at times even be a major factor in creating new and drastic societal and political processes. A typical instance of this phenomenon is when a leader experiences sustained anxiety or other unpleasant emotions such as depression or humiliation due to the reactivation of internal mental conflicts. The societal or political arena is then utilized in an attempt to find an external solution for an internal dilemma. At such times the leader’s personality plays a key role in the “choice” of what societal or political process to initiate or become involved in.  

In 1926 Freud proposed four situations that were internally dangerous and induced anxiety in an individual. The first is the fear of the loss of a love object. The second involves fear of losing the love provided by the love object. The third can be described as losing a body part and is associated with fear of castration. The fourth danger refers to the fear of not living up to the internalized expectations of important others (superego) and therefore reflects a loss of self-esteem. When an external situation is unconsciously perceived as echoing one of these threats, or a combination of them, their images become part of internal mental conflicts and the individual may experience anxiety and regress.  

An individual’s established personality tells us a great deal about how he or she will respond to regression and anxiety-producing events. For example, because obsessional individuals have difficulty tolerating loss of control, we would expect a leader with such a personality to experience internal danger and anxiety if he or she felt that a political situation or a political rival could not be controlled. He or she then may unconsciously experience loss of love or self-esteem. The obsessional leader then may respond in an exaggerated fashion and seek rules, regulations and official policies or other sources of rationalization and intellectualization to address the crisis at the expense of exploring creative and adaptive solutions. Or she or she may exhibit extreme ambivalence toward his or her “uncontrolled” opponent and behave in irrational ways.  

The main fear of a leader with a narcissistic personality is a threat to his or her sense of uniqueness and superiority. Leaders who have narcissistic personalities are pre-occupied with self-importance and fantasies of unbounded success to which they feel entitled. While they demand admiration from others, they are aloof and without empathy toward them. The are compelled to be “number one” in power, prestige, and fame and split off and deny their “hungry,” dependent and devalued aspects.  

Such a person may be deeply involved with politics and social issues, but he or she sees them unilaterally without reference to the views of others who are perceived as “inferior,” and remains essentially indifferent to and “above” humanity in general. Although the narcissistic leader may appear aloof, and therefore indicate the possibility of an obsessional character, obsessional individuals are emotionally far more in tune with those around them, and are often capable of sincere and passionate concern for social and political issues (Kernberg, 1970).  

Another characteristic of some people with a narcissistic personality is their conscious or unconscious fantasy that they live by themselves in a splendid “glass bubble” (Volkan, 1979). Through the glass they watch others outside their own glorious but lonely “kingdom” and divide them into two groups: those who support their narcissism and those who are devalued. Those who are devalued may be perceived as an enemy, or may be disregarded as completely insignificant.  

When a narcissistic leader’s superiority and power are threatened, he or she experiences shame and humiliation. Feelings of rage may follow. In order to stabilize or reestablish his or her narcissistic personality, the leader is then internally compelled to act, and the decisions that result may have drastic societal or political consequences.   

 

Richard Nixon: Responses of a Narcissistic Personality  

An examination of Richard Nixon’s adult life reveals that the dominant aspect of his personality was narcissistic, although he utilized obsessional preoccupations to support his narcissism (Volkan, Itzkowitz and Dod, 1997). He was preoccupied with power and superiority—first with achieving it and later with defending it from the many “enemies” he perceived around him. According to his wife, since the time they met in college, Nixon had always been “president of some group like the 20-30 Club, and this, that and the other thing” (Mazo and Hess, 1967, p. 30). He ran for thirteen elections, starting with class president in high school, and only lost three. At the age of 33 he was elected to the US Congress, became a US Senator at the age of 37, and became the second youngest US Vice President at the age of 39. As president, he continued to collect important or “historic” achievements that included being the first US president to visit China, as well as many lesser and even seemingly trivial “firsts” that he instructed those in his entourage to record for posterity. According to his aide John Ehrlichman, “there was a running gag on any campaign; everything that happened was a ‘historic first’” (Volkan, Itzkowitz and Dod, 1997, p. 94).  

Like narcissists with “glass bubble” fantasies, Nixon was a loner who seemed to arrive at many decisions by talking to himself in private. He did have close advisors, and certainly worked closely with and respected the opinions of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, yet was not a patient listener. According to Roger Ailes, one of his aides in the White House, “He knew what you were going to talk about. He generally knew what your opinion was, already knew what his answer would be” (Volkan, Itzkowitz and Dod, 1997, p. 99). He had few intimate friends. 

But in spite or even perhaps because of this narcissistic personality, Nixon was a highly successful politicians and at times an effective and respected president. However, there are several examples of periods when Nixon responded to shame and humiliation and made decisions to re-establish his narcissistic personality that had widespread and devastating repercussions. Blema Steinberg (1996), a political scientist as well as a psychoanalyst, notes that the frustration and humiliation that Nixon encountered in dealing with the war in Vietnam at the outset of his first administration, as well as a series of unrelated events, prompted Nixon to lash out and seek a target through which he could address the needs of his narcissistic personality and restore his power and prestige in his own mind.   

Part of Nixon’s election campaign of 1968 was to end the Vietnam War “with honor,” yet the North Vietnamese would not come to the bargaining table on terms acceptable to Nixon, launched a new offensive into South Vietnam, fired rockets into Saigon, and were perceived as otherwise trying to test, thwart and humiliate him. Domestic sources also added to Nixon’s humiliation. Within the first year of his administration, two of his Supreme Court nominations were rejected by the Senate, the threat of anti-war student demonstrations prevented him from attending the graduation of his daughter Julie from Smith College and his son-in-law David from Amherst, and the Apollo 13 moon mission was aborted, leaving Nixon “frustrated, angry and embarrassed” (Steinberg, 1996, p. 185). The shame and humiliation this series of events induced internal danger signals.  

To re-establish the stability of his narcissistic personality in the face of these threats, Nixon hastily chose to exert and reconfirm his power and superiority through a secret offensive against North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases in Cambodia. Although the enemy “sanctuaries” in Cambodia were used as staging areas for attacks into South Vietnam, and were therefore militarily signficant, any policy to escalate the war and launch an offesive into another sovereign and neutral nation had serious and widespread implications both in Southeast Asia and at home. His plans to bomb enemy bases in Cambodia, and his later decision to invade using US troops, were not supported by several of the limited number of staff who knew of the covert operation, but Nixon was not deterred. Kissinger was told to inform the State Department of the first B-52 mission “only after the point of no return … the order is not appealable” (Ambrose, 1989, p. 258). There was more to the decision—made quickly, secretively, and exclusively by Nixon—than military strategy. The North Vietanmese would not be allowed to get away with making Nixon appear weak, impotent, or indecisive.  

In the public speech in which Nixon announced his invasion of Cambodia, delivered nearly a year after the covert bombing began, the importance of the policy as a means of supporting a sense of grandiosity (now displaced on the USA) seem clear. He said, “We will not be humiliated…. we will not be defeated.” Under no circumstance would the United States act “like a pitiful, helpless giant”—instead America must respond decisively since “it is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight” (Ambrose, 1989, p. 345). Student protest broke out across the nation, and nearly 100,000 protesters eventually converged on Washington. In Cambodia a full-fledged war broke out and raged for five years, and continued for another twenty as the Khmer Rouge sought complete control through the “killing fields.” 

 

Large Group Identity 

Thus far I have focused on a leader who experiences anxiety and humiliation and attempts to find external solutions for his or her internal demands. When a leader’s attempt to change the external world dovetails with followers’ shared regression and anxiety about their large-group identity, drastic societal and political processes may be initiated. I have found it helpful to describe what is meant by the term “large-group identity” by using an analogy of a large canvas tent (Volkan, 1992, 1997, 1999a, 1999b). Imagine that, from childhood on, we learn to wear two layers of clothing. The first layer, which belongs to the individual who wears it, fits snugly. This garment is an individual’s core personal identity that provides his or her inner sense of “sameness”—meaning that the person intrapsychically feels a core sameness from one day or year to the next. The second layer is a loose covering made of the canvas of the large group’s tent. Under this canvas the person shares a persistent sense of sameness with thousands or millions of others in a given large group, although they may also share some characteristics with those in a “foreign” group. Although an individual will meet only a tiny percentage of people in his or her own large group, he or she nevertheless perceives a sense of sameness with them, and gets a feelings of belonging, protection and comfort from sharing the tent’s canvas with all others in the group. 

Because both garments are worn every day, the individual hardly notices them under normal circumstances. At times of collective stress, however, such as drastic political change, war, or economic crisis, the tent canvas may take on greater importance, and individuals may collectively seek the protection of their large-group tent. At such times the leader (the pole of the tent) is called upon to repair and maintain the large-group identity.  

An example is seen in the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. When Tito, communist ideology and state coercion could no longer provide an “artificial” sense of unity among Slavic people of the Balkans, and political and economic crises arose, the Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks began to ask, “Who are we now?” Such a question leads to the reactivation of symbols, images of past shared events, traditional cultural rituals, and other means through which a large group confirms its identity and promotes societal cohesion. A leader then typically emerges who instinctively or calculatedly responds to these needs of the group. When his or her personal identity is also threatened by these disruptive, stress-inducing events, or by other personal factors, his or her expressions of personality become an increasingly important factor in creating cohesion for both the leader and for the followers in the large group. Under such circumstances, the leader’s personality may become the defining factor in determining whether the followers’ shared sentiments of nationalism or ethnicity will be tamed or inflamed.  

 

The Leader’s Role in Redefining Large-Group Identity  

Two events that can be considered hallmarks of the current era, the birth of post-apartheid South Africa and the death of the former Yugoslavia, can shed some light on the role of a leader’s personality and his or her relationship with the large group. The recent history of both South Africa and Yugolavia involved massive change in and total disruption of a governmental, social and philosophical system, and both induced regression and anxiety within their respective nations as large-group identities were re-examined and redefined. But the transforming leaders that emerged within these two situations, Nelson Mandela and Slobodan Milosević, responded to the crisis of systemic dissolution, large group regression, and questions about large-group identity in different ways. Mandela’s substantive as well as symbolic actions have collectively “taught” South Africans, both black and white, how to usefully adapt to new social and political challenges and the emotional legacy of apartheid. Milosević successfully ignited virulent Serbian nationalism and helped Serbs come together as a cohesive group through their shared sense of victimization, and their demonization of and desire for revenge against an enemy symbolized by Yugoslav Muslims. In short, through the influence of their personalities, Mandela initiated a process of bringing together two groups that had lived separately and in conflict for decades, while Milosević incited a war among groups that had lived together peacefully for some time.   

Mandela’s personal approach to leading post-apartheid South Africa is evident in his involvement in the 1995 World Cup Rugby Championship hosted by South Africa. Rugby had been considered a white man’s sport in South Africa and “a symbol of white Afrikaner unity and pride dating back to the Boer War “ (Swift, 1995, p. 32), and although South Africa produced talented rugby teams, they had been barred from the first two World Cup Rugby Championships, in 1987 and 1991, because of apartheid. Hosting the 1995 World Cup was therefore of great political significance for the new South Africa, and Mandela could enhance both national and international prestige if the event was successful.  

Mandela’s task was made even more challenging since the South African team, the Springboks, had only one black player, and the name of the team invoked associations with apartheid itself. But instead of simply ensuring a well-run tournament and portraying South Africa as a reformed and responsible host, Mandela’s personality actually helped to promote the process of emotional unification in South Africa. 

To encourage the feeling that rugby now belonged to all South Africans, Mandela visited the team’s training camp, shook hands with the players, patted their backs, and wore a Springbok cap. He told the team that the whole nation was behind them and began to make public statements about the new image of the Springboks. In turn, the Springboks reciprocated. The day before their match against the former champion, Australia, the South African rugby team went to Robben Island, off Cape Town, where Mandela had been imprisoned for 18 years. They visited Mandela’s former cell and dedicated their efforts in the World Cup to their president. The whole country was galvanized. The next day, under the spell of this emotional atmosphere, the Springboks defeated Australia 27-18. In the black township of Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, forty-four percent of the nine million residents watched a game that had previously been associated with the pro-apartheid white regime (Swift, 1995), and they did so even though the single black player on the team was forced to sit on the sideline due to an injury. 

 

On the day before the Springbok’s next match against France, Mandela gave a speech in Ezakheni, a black community, where he pointed to his Springbok cap and said: “This cap does honor to our boys. I ask you to stand by them tomorrow because they are our kind.” (Swift, 1995, p.32). South African blacks identified with Mandela and with his acceptance of the white regime’s sport—the unlikely symbol of South Africa’s apartheid past was transformed into a symbol of unity and hope for the modification of societal attitudes. Millions cheered the team’s upset of France the next day, and the 1995 Rugby World Cup came to a crescendo when South Africa defeated top-ranked New Zealand in overtime to win the championship. Soon afterward, the Springboks began a campaign to encourage black township residents to pay their utility bills as part of their contribution to the rebuilding of South Africa. A white man’s sport had become a vehicle for education about civil responsibility, adaptation, and post-apartheid politics. 

Leaders also can utilize symbols and encourage transformations in a highly maladaptive way. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, when Serbs were attempting to consolidate their “new” identity, Slobodan Milosević encouraged them to adopt political doctrines of entitlement and purification rather than cooperation and coexistence. It would be misleading to portray as solely Milosević responsible for the many tragedies of the Balkans, since animosity between Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks existed long before he came to power, and many complex issues and events are involved. But it is also clear that the decisions Milosević made were not intended to encourage peace, stability, and ethnic tolerance. Elsewhere (Volkan, 1997, 1999) I give extensive details of this story, but provide a brief summary here.  

Before the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina began, for example, state propaganda under’s tutelage Milosević aimed to reactivate the mental representation of the Battle of Kosovo between the Serbians and the Ottomans which had been fought 600 years earlier. In Serbian’s minds this event marked the end of their most glorious period, the death of one of their holiest leaders, the beginning of their subjugation, and conjured up images of defeat and conquest for Serbians. did Milosević not “invent” Serbian’s feelings toward this historic event—they had been kept alive for centuries in Serbian folksongs, other art forms, and church and school teachings—but he did, with the help of the Serbian Orthodox Church and certain Serbian intellectuals, actively encourage their resurrection and elevation in the Serb’s individual and collective consciousness. In preparing for the 600th anniversary of the battle (1989), he arranged for the body of Prince Lazar, the Serbian leader who was killed at Kosovo, to be taken from one Serbian village to another in a year-long journey back to his original tomb near the site of the battle (in the province of Kosovo). In each city and town where Lazar’s body was taken, political speeches were made and “funeral” ceremonies were held, attended by huge crowds of mourners dressed in black, as if Lazar had been killed only recently.  

These commemorative events created an atmosphere for a “time collapse”: the shared fantasies and feelings pertaining to the mental representation of a past event became intertwined with shared perceptions and anxieties pertaining to current social and political conditions. The time collapse then permitted the introduction of a more generalized political ideology of entitlement for revenge. Since Lazar was killed by the Ottoman Turks, the present day Serbs, as a large group, began to feel that they were entitled to take revenge and kill Bosnian Muslims, whom they perceived and actually referred to as extensions of the Ottoman Muslims (Volkan, 1977, 1999). With the entitlement ideology came a purification doctrine in which the Serbs wished to purify themselves from unwanted Bosniaks. A most malignant form of purification, so-called ethnic cleansing, then occurred, and a similar process was then pursued in Kosovo. 

 

Complicated Mourning and Milosević’s Personality  

I have not studied in depth the development of Nelson Mandela’s personality and therefore cannot offer many insights about how or why he has become the type of leader that he is, or why he has made certain decisions. It is clear, however, that his personality was well suited to encourage creative and adaptive approaches to the many problems that face South Africa. In spite of the tremendous adversity that he and all black South Africans have faced, he has been able to internally reconcile many conflicting emotions and experiences, resist the temptations of revenge, egocentrism, or a cult of personality, and exhibit constant and repeated behavior, emotions and thought processes that can be used as positive models for his followers. He has encouraged South Africans, both black and white, to enter into an open-ended and adaptive process of remembering, mourning, forgiving, and looking optimistically toward the future.  

I have gathered, however, some information on Slobodan Milosević’s inner life and personality. It seems to be an unavoidable tendency among the behavioral sciences to devote more energy to understanding the mentally “ill” rather than the mentally “healthy,” and parallels exist within almost all disciplines. This is also the case in regard to my comparative knowledge of Mandela and Milosević. Through both secondary sources as well as personal interviews with individuals who have known I have concluded that the Serbian leader exhibits characteristics of schizoid, obsessional and narcissistic personality. He is aloof, calculating and self-centered, and seems determined to remain “number one” at almost any cost, including the destruction of others. This makes his narcissism rather malignant.  

Milosević comes from a broken family, and experienced numerous traumas in his early years. When he was seven, his favorite uncle, an army officer, put a gun to his head and killed himself. When he was twenty-one, his father did the same thing. His mother killed herself when he was in his early thirties. He married his teenage sweetheart, Mirjana Markovic, but this story is no fairy tale either. According to Norman Mailer (1999), Markovic’s mother, a Yugoslav partisan during World War II, “was captured by the Nazis, tortured, surrendered crucial information, was released, and then was executed by the leader of her partisan group, who happened to be her father” (p. A25). 

It is difficult to imagine that these experiences did not have a profound affect on shaping Milosević’s adult personality. Both his and his wife’s violent loss of love objects must have caused complicated mourning and difficult adaptations. A close bond apparently exists between the two—they may function to patch up each others’ psychic wounds and have a special relationship in which they live together in a “glass bubble.” But Milosević otherwise does not trust those in his environment, or have many close relationships. A saying in Belgrade goes something like this: “Pity on the person whom Milosević calls a friend!”  

Clinical evidence indicates that individuals who have experienced such drastic losses and have become stuck in complicated mourning tend to “resurrect” the dead and their substitutes in an attempt to mourn, although this process never has an adaptive end for them. The libidinal wish to repair the image of the loss and the aggressive wish to “kill” it seem doomed to repeatedly alternate. This background may explain why Milosević played a key role in bringing Lazar back to “life” and facilitated his “funeral” in every Serbian town. We can speculate that his own troubles of mourning found a counterpart in the Serbian people’s shared inability to mourn the losses associated with Ottoman control of the Balkans and their ancient leader, Lazar, who had been “martyred” six centuries earlier. Through resurrecting Lazar, one of Milosević’s motivations may have been to initiate some form of both individual and collective mourning. It is unclear whether his original plan in 1989 was to stoke Serbian nationalism to the point of ethnic cleansing, but that was the ultimate result, and a great deal of evidence indicates that his personality encouraged rather than impeded these malignant forces once they were unleashed.  

 

Real World Issues 

In his book Grundsätze der Realpolitik (“Basic Principles of Realpolitik”), Ludwig von Rochau (1853) advised political leaders and politicians to carefully estimate what their opponents really wanted, not what they said they wanted, and to be prepared to use force when necessary to achieve their own or thwart someone else’s objectives. Eventually Realpolitik came to mean that political life was exclusively dominated by secondary process thinking, realistic assessment of options, and rational formulas to maximize one’s own carefully defined interests. Political scientists, historians, and others who evaluate political leaders and their decisions have adopted this ideal, often called the “rational actor model,” and therefore mainly focus on economic, legal, military and related issues.  

While “rational actor” models still dominate political analysis, some have recognized their limitations. Since the 1980s, interest has increased in using cognitive psychology to explain certain aberrant or “irrational” political decisions. Although this can be considered “progress,” systematic use of psychoanalytic data concerning leaders and their decision-making patterns and processes remain scarce (see Volkan et al., 1998).  

In this paper I illustrate how and when the personalities of a leader can initiate and/or become intertwined with societal and political processes. In doing so, I am not suggesting that “real world” issues and secondary process calculations are not important and should be discarded in favor of psychological considerations. Instead, I suggest that psychoanalysts can contribute to a more complete analysis of political or societal processes and the personalities of leaders who play major roles in them. Only through such interdisciplinary work can we fully understand the complex and intertwined nature of the crucial events that shape our internal and external worlds.  

 

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