David Hamburg Interview (1986); Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Dr. Hamburg, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
What relevance do the insights of psychiatry and biology have for studies of conflict and conflict resolution?
I think in my own case, the occurrences of human conflict at the individual and small-group level led me to be curious to learn more about human conflict as I encountered these situations with my patients early in my career. And then in my research on the biology and psychology of human responses to stressful experience, among the most interesting ones are those that are associated with intense conflict, have strong biological ramifications throughout the organism. So those pathways had a lot to do with the broadening of my interest in human conflict and resolution.
Are our ways of thinking about conflict, at both the individual and societal level, atavistic?
I think that the old human organism has now been plunked down in utterly different social contexts. That's one of the great dilemmas that we face: to understand how it is that the old biology and customs that we bring to the world transformed in the threshold of the twenty-first century -- how somehow we can make that fit. The requirements upon us, even for survival, are so different than they were a century or two ago.
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