 Vamık D. Volkan is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia and an emeritus training and supervising analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, D.C. During his 39 years at the University of Virginia Volkan was the medical director of the university's Blue Ridge Hospital for eighteen years.A year after his 2002 retirement, he became the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and he has spent three to six months there each year for ten years.In the early 1980s Volkan was a member and later the chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs.