Editorial note:
This panel of the Symposium, under the collective title "Believing in democracy", consists of the following papers by Sotiris Manolopoulos and Claire-Marine François-Poncet, and will form the basis of their dialogue within the Symposium.
Another paper by Claire-Marine François-Poncet appears further down this page.
THE WORK OF DEMOCRACY IN THE EPF
By Sotiris Manolopoulos
The EPF, has been thought of as a “unity of space” that organizes disparate stories (Groen-Prakken, 1997). It is a cultural and institutional space, where the European psychoanalytic community becomes a living reality.
We can imagine every EPF meeting as an ancient Greek polis, staged on an Athenian theatre; a place where history can unfold into differentiated narrative for the future; a history supported by its founding myths..., a designated geographical locale, and figuratively, a recurrent concept or formula (Zeitlin,1990, p. 130). The EPF’s recurrent formula is to organize meetings where we think, discuss and negotiate our scientific affairs as European analysts.
Through the poets we know that Democracy does not suppress the irrational. Euripides, in Suppliant Women - his praise of Athens and democracy - showed us that cultural institutions do not replace myths; they integrate them. Myths are the dreams of society (Freud, 1900). We institute our societies through our creative imagination (myths, dreams).
We construct cultural institutions and individual superego (ego ideal) in order to incarnate the ideas of culture and transmit them to the next generation. Thus, we place ourself inside history.
We can think of the EPF as the edifice, constructed by European analysts to preserve and transmit their ideas. We can imagine the endless hours of work of people who loved communicating via their different togues, and analytic idioms. The EPF has become a living frame, that organizes our experiences each time we meet, and we reconstruct in our minds its unconscious psychic reality.
For Winnicott our institution is felt as a holding environment only when we feel that it concerns us personally. Does the EPF concern us? Is it relevant to our professional life?
Winnicott (1971, p.68) describes the circumstances of the negative of civilization in pathological oppressive communities where the environment destroys the creativity of individuals. Those who remain creative are those who suffer.
We are concerned about our institutions because, as Claire-Marine demonstrates, at times of regression the early infant-mother mass psychology of primary identifications is revived in societies (Freud, 1921).
We think of the EPF and psychoanalysis as lines of resistance against the negative of civilization today, that is, an ‘oppressive regime’, characterized by concrete thinking, the abolition of complexity and the après coup time for self-reflection, the decline of interest in literature history and democracy, an incapacity to doubt and see the world creatively, the refusal of the sense of irony and the sense of tragic.
Taking the parent-infant relationship as a model for the processes of unintegration-integration-disintegration (Winnicott, 1960) in our institutions, we can think that the EPF is a good enough institution; a holding environment. Democracy in the EPF is a work of culture in the transitional space of experience that absorbs the shock of the loss of omnipotence that reality causes, while people are engaged with politics struggling to separate and link phantasy and reality.
When the early holding environment fails, reality intrudes traumatically, and it is reacted against by character formations that perpetuate infantile omnipotence, arrogance, attacks on meaning, thoughtlessness, hubris. The current decline of democracy can be thought of as the result of character repetitions caused by pathologies of the intermediate area of culture.
*
Schnapper (1994, p. 66) writes: “Aristotle believed that political activity, which alone dignified the human, allowed man to realize in himself that which was properly human”. There is no citizen off the world, and off the bounds of politics. The citizen is a tragic subject within the bounds of history.
From Dracon (624 BC) to Solon (594 BC) the Athenians attained first that laws need to be written, and second, the recognition of the need for representation and mediation in the place of the direct embodiment of the polis that was ruled by powerful aristocrats. The administration became gradually more inclusive.
The word democracy was coined around the middle of the 5th century BC when the political regime was put under the kratos (rule) of the demos (people). This was a radical change. Right away however, Athenians realized that they needed to put a restraint in the impunity of the demos.
Foucault (1983), examined the ancient concept of parresia (παρρησία, free speech). He examined the critical ethos, an important stance before the philosophical question ‘what is the truth’. This is the ability to question, to doubt, to negate, to stand opposite the political and intellectual authority and dare criticize it. It is a part of what he called historical ontology of the self, since humans have the capacity to say the truth, and by saying the truth, to transform their self, and their society.
Aristotle was a democrat. For him, explains Hermet (1997), the polis represented the community of citizens organized by means of a constitution (politeia). Power lies in the law. Aristotle believes that a good administration can be achieved only through a mixed system, that has the people’s legitimacy mediated by aristocrats, in the sense of the best (aristoi) leaders who... must be different from the people. However, for Athenians, the people and the leaders, the governed and the governing, must resemble each other and be interchangeable at any time. The basic principle in Athenian democracy concerned the living experience of people’s authenticity, and not its effectiveness as a system of government. Even if the results of the use of balloting could be disastrous, it is the golden rule of administration since it safeguards the respect for the quality of being a citizen.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1835, 1840) thought of omnipotence as a dangerous thing. We need to be skeptical of power, wherever it stems from. We should not trust the political will. Extreme individualism is a threat to democracy. Democracy is a form of government, also a form of social life.
There are forms of despotism, stemming from political extremism, and also from the fatigue and withdrawal of the citizens, the de-symbolisation and de-legitimisation of institutions, and the effacement of political passions (Sevastakis, 2024). The fathers of the American democracy based their optimism regarding the ‘checks and balances’ on the ambition of powers (executive, legislative, judicial). What they did not predict was the lack of passion to be a subject and the passion to think, the lack of ambition, the tendency to become tourists in politics.
Democracy is a utopia, also a real regime, a system of government. It is based on the belief in an eternal prototype of justice. Then, the political institutions and practices are judged in comparison to an ideal. Democracy is also based on the belief in conventions that humans invent in order to respond to the needs of specific circumstances. There is a constant tension between utopia and tradition (Haddock, 2005).
Manville and Ober (2023, pp 3-10) observe that Democracy is born and survives because of a constant civic bargain. The bargain cannot meet everyone’s needs and desires. We must make compromises. That is why democracy is always an imperfect and messy regime. The citizen of a democracy, as a tragic subject, struggles with borderline situations, at risk of abolishing limits and committing hubris.
*
When participating in EPF meetings, (administrative, and scientific) I was listening to the leading analysts of Europe, discussing their affairs; a group of colleagues taking time, thinking, negotiating differences. At times I thought ‘What am I doing here’. But then I returned once more. The EPF survived my transference attacks, and was found again and again outside my omnipotence, a useful space.
Although I agree with you that those regressive tendencies to dividing community ties are permanent within a democratic order, I believe that they can be worked through by what I call the “arts of politics”. How does EPF offer us such a democratic space where the management of conflicts around historical groups may lead to meaningful changes?
I feel grateful to Jorge Canestri and his executive council for giving me an example of good democratic politics, where only omnipotence is impossible, not governance. Let me give you two examples:
One was the crisis over the IPA decision to modify the Eitingon model, so that the sessions of personal training analysis could be 3-4-5 times a week. The tensions were very high between presidents of societies and IPA representatives. Canestri intervened and prevented the escalation from exceeding the limits of a democratic discussion. He said: “Let us see now what you may propose to change”. When the participants stopped referring to others with accusations, and began to discuss our principles, method and issues, about the development of differing ways of managing transference, the discussion became possible. Training is a utopia. It is also part of history.
The other incident was a protest against the way the invitation of the Polish Society for the EPF conference showed an idyllic image while it ignored the persecution that the Jews suffered in Polland in the past. The way the tension was escalating via the use of emails seemed counterproductive to me. It did not benefit the issue. I realized that we psychoanalysts speak about important matters, but we do not really know their history. I said as much, and I added that what is true for Polland is also true for Greece and France, in various times through history and in various forms, and so on. Later I read Mazower’s work (2025) where he argues convincingly that antisemitism is not an absolute idea. It is a reality that needs to be placed in the context of history.
Democracy is inside, a state of self, and also outside, a form of social life and a political regime. In democracy an assembly of citizens meet, and create the condition in which persuasion can be achieved, through drastic words (in Arendt’s terms). Also, a psychic assembly (phantasies, affects, object relationships, defenses) reaches a ‘tragic position’, a new integration that generates experience and action. It is a psychic achievement. The subject separates from the primary union, and faces the shock of the loss of omnipotence, with the employment of transitional objects in external reality. If we have not reached a tragic position, we omnipotently create destructive tragedies in external reality.
In ancient tragedy, the omnipotence of hubris is shattered and we emerge as a subject who “yokes the yoke of necessity”. We become personally responsible for what has to happen because of an ageless planning by mysterious forces. We become able to suffer our fate, to undertake our portion in life. We realize that there are no lessons to learn from history, yet there is no place for us outside history (Williams, 1993).
*
Can the work of culture in psychoanalysis be extended to the work of culture in democratic spaces? Psychoanalysts today think themselves as competent to ask questions about real tragedies in external reality, in which regimes of oppression (repetitions compulsions) rein. Many of us believe that the future of psychoanalysis lies in our work with: mental illness, medical hospitals, schools, jails, universities, environmental disasters, wars, dictatorships.
Did the opening to new languages and cultures allowed EPF to grow in maturity? How EPF can remain a “mature society”? The EPF is a democratic institution. Like a tragic theatre, the EPF’s unity of space is a capacity of links of meaning, a space of freedom of thinking and expression. It is instituted and reinstituted my myths, dreams, and imagination. It is a beta and an alpha space where our community becomes a living reality, and where our personal pain is given meaning, in order for us to be able to suffer and discover it (Bion, 1970). We do not own democracy and the EPF. We question the unknown following ‘Freud’s groping and his gradual failure to finalize anything except that he had set going a process which we and all future generations can use for therapy, which is research into the nature of man…’ (Winnicott, 1964, p. 483). We keep EPF and its democracy as an open-ended process, a research project.
For Winnicott (1950) the word democracy means a ‘mature society’ that is well adjusted to its mature members. It is a political system, it is also a psychic and social achievement. The secret ballot is the core of the work of democracy. The voter expresses not only conscious but also unconscious “deep feelings”. The final decision is a personalized solution to this inner conflict. If the anti-social members of a society, reach a critical mass, then the society risks losing its capacity to function democratically. In the absence of sufficient maturity, a society risks falling into authoritarian or totalitarian patterns. Standard forms of civic engagement that lack opportunities for genuine conflict and negotiation can foster a "false selfhood," limiting citizens' capacity for democratic integration.
References
Bion, W. R. (1970 [1984]). Attention and Interpretation. In Seven Servants. Four works by Wilfred R. Bion. New York, Jason Aronson.
Foucault, M. (2016 [2023]). Discours et vérité, précédé se La parrésia. Édition étable par henri-Paul Fruchard et Daniele Lorenzini. Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin. In Greek, translated by G.A. Dimitrakopoulos. Athens: Doma.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E., 5,6.
Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E., 18.
Haddock, B. (2005 [2025]). A History of Political Thought: 1789 to the Present., In Greek (Transl. V. Frosynos) Athens: Pataki Publications.
Groen-Prakken, H. (1997) Towards a Pan-European Psychoanalytical Federation: On the development of the psychoanalytic movement in Central and Eastern Europe, 1987 – 1996.
Manville, B. & Ober, J. (2023). The Civic Bargain. How Democracy Survives.
Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press.
Mazower, M. (2025). On Antisemitism. A world in History. London: Penguin Press.
Schnapper, D. (1994 [2017]). Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality Paperback. London and New York, Routledge.
Sevastakis, N. (2024). Political Liberation and Social Critique. In Greek. Athens: Polis.
De Tocqueville, A. (2003 [1835,1840]). Democracy in America and Two Essays on America. Transl. G.E. Bevan. New York, Penguin Books.
Williams, B. (1993). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press. 10.4324/9781003252184-2
Winnicott, D. W. (1950 [1980]). Some Thoughts on the Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy’. In Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. New York: Penguin Books.
Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:585-595.
Winnicott, D.W. (1964 [1989]). C.G. Jung. Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflection. In Psychoanalytic Explorations. Edited by Cl. Winnicott, E. R. Shepherd, M. Davis. London: Karnac.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.
Zeitlin, I, Fr. (1990). Thebes: Theatre of Self and Society in Athenian Drama, In John J. Winkler and Froma J. Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama In its Social Context. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Believing in democracy
by Claire-Marine François-Poncet
INTRODUCTION
The title “Believing in democracy” attempts to illustrate how the democratic order, under the Rule of Law and its universal values, has to represent as well conflictual cultural interests, beliefs and ties of belonging. EPF is a federation offering a democratic call through its invitation to dialogue between different psychoanalytical cultures and paradigms, under their common interest in psychoanalysis and psychic life.
The modern revolution of Humanism introduced a major, but quite recent, historical move in Europe. Modernity represents the end of heteronomy when the beliefs in a religious or sacred Other, superior to our human nature, determine the external foundations of our social links. The transition to a democratic humanist order where societies think by themselves common laws who hold them together is based on the new order of individual autonomy brought by the Enlightment . While religious based orders still prevail in most part of the world, the crisis of contemporary democracy in Europe is fuelled by a resurgence of beliefs and projections full of hatred that take the form of nationalist or identity-based assertions. The battle is fought in the name of the very values of democracy, its principle of equality, yet involves an attack on the rule of law and a return to religious or conspiracy-based fundamentalism. Could the disintegration of the social-democratic fabric, partly resulting from the hegemony of the global economy amplified by a lawless digital virtual world, be linked to the tendency to forget that political battles are fought not so much in the realm of ideas as in the tangible experience of men and women, where they feel their sense of belonging to “us” or to “common sense”?
As the argument of this symposium points out, the EPF was born out of the ruins of a Europe decimated by the Second World War, where feelings of national identity proved to be the most dangerous social beliefs of the twentieth century (Elias, 1991). Today, the EPF facilitates dialogue between 44 nations, and its integration of Eastern European countries, which were behind the Iron Curtain until 1989, is an illustration of the democratic process of its expansion (Han Groen-Prakken, 1996). The 2024 Dresden Conference on Freedom opened a new chapter in the history of our unifying ties, against the backdrop of new wars affecting our member countries.
For Freud, group psychology precedes individual psychology and is rooted in regressive yearnings for primitive undifferentiated love in search of unlimited narcissistic and emotional satisfaction. A humanist and a Jew by conviction, Freud suggested that the need to believe must be sublimated (Freud, 1910). What are the places of sublimation, or symbolization, offered by democracy to give our beliefs the destiny of the particular in the universal (Manolopoulos, 2025)? These places, including that of analysis, are protected by freedom of expression and respect for privacy in the democratic order. But do they allow us to confront the forces that oppose democracy, which exploit our frustrations and aspirations for autocracy in the form of dogmatism and the cult of authority? Does universalism consist in being able to translate common humanist values, such as the aspiration for justice or peace, from one culture to another?
Our own beliefs in psychoanalysis, our affiliations with mentors or foundational works, divide us into analytical cultures that assert their own rules and institutions. Could the European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF) offer a democratic space for working through conflicts of loyalty to our societies or our original analytic languages?
Analytic practice, which has its origins in European humanistic culture, provides a space for treatment and for becoming disillusioned with our beliefs. “The emancipatory effect of the analytic experience” (Grabska, 2025, p.135) allows patients to engage in their own speech, in a transition from a truth imposed by others to a truth discovered by the subject for themselves. We could define the “work of culture” (Freud, 1930a) with the formula: “Where group psychology operates, individual psychology must come into being.” But this work of culture does not free the individual from their drives or their infantile omnipotence; it allows them “to gain freedom by expanding their existence in search of a freedom that takes into account the psychic and social constraints of themselves and others” (Parsons, 2025, p.30). Does the practice of democracy, like that of analysis, represent the same movement towards human fulfilment (Tocqueville, 2002)?
DEVELOPMENT
The collective imagination of modern democracy in Europe, which is inseparable from the republican order of the nation state, is based on the universal values of justice, fraternity and equality before the law. This imagination can inspire boundless hope, even though democracy can only be a regulatory idea and an ideal that must be constantly redefined and perfected. Its utopia has long benefited from the military, political and economic domination of Europe, where it originated. But can the critical spirit of the democratic order, based on reason and the Enlightenment’s search for truth, do without unifying beliefs or myths? For nothing is less natural or spontaneous than the universalism of the values of the democratic order, which must not be confused with the unique imaginative worlds specific to our ties of belonging or the vitality of our cultural, identity-based and historical beliefs.
At the beginning was the “we”, faith before the law
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921c) puts forward the idea that human psychology was initially, as the title of his essay suggests, a group psychology from which individual psychology only emerged later. But for Freud, group situations are defined not so much by the number of people involved as by the fact that they are governed by a common ideal ego, which allows the group to project onto the stranger all the ambivalence that it spares itself in order to preserve its unity. He defines the first group psychology as the state of love that parents feel for their child, onto whom they project their unifying and repressive beliefs, which form the basis of the child's identity and sense of belonging against a backdrop of unlimited narcissistic aspirations. “Cultural acquisitions” and “laws of society” are “suspended in favor of the child,” a projection of the parents’ “narcissistic system” (Freud, 1914c, p. 91). The projection of the unconscious infantile omnipotence of the family environment onto “His Majesty the Baby” is based on identity-based injunctions in the form of cultural variants imposed by the beliefs, customs, rites, narratives of a social group of belonging. From birth, these cultural, identity-based, or narcissistic ties that unite the child with its environment are based on attributions of “good” and “bad”, “pure” or “impure”, according to judgments that invite the child to project what is “bad” onto strangers from a neighboring culture, whose “small differences” (Freud) could threaten the narcissistic unity of the family by revealing repressed hatred and ambivalence. These attributions are arbitrary, as they could be replaced by other values in other cultures, but they are genuine “judgments”. Indeed, for the unconscious of the child's environment, their transgression endangers the future of the child onto whom desires for “the immortality of the ego” (Freud, 1914c, p.91) are projected.
The child integrates these beliefs in order to maintain the narcissistic bond that unites him or her with their parents and their group of affiliation. Even before the child can speak, his developing mind knows what it must “swallow” or “spit out,” both literally and figuratively, if he does not want to break the fundamental unity that is the source of his identity. These early beliefs form the basis of the child’s first social ties, allowing him to believe in himself, but also to construct his psychic life by projecting evil or impurity onto strangers. The regressive register of this belief system is illustrated in conflicts between sister nations, such as France and Germany or Serbia and Croatia in the past, or today Russia and Ukraine, whose mutual hatred is incomprehensible in view of their common democratic and cultural values and their numerous mixed alliances.
Is this regressive register sometimes at work when our groups of analytic affiliation continue to fight each other in the name of our dividing beliefs and judgments on the definition or the future of psychoanalysis ?
Extending our ties of affiliation: the example of analytic families
In continuity with our family ties and historical affiliations, we build other families—political, analytical, religious, cultural—which are sometimes the source of conflicting identities. We can observe that beliefs, rituals, and the social habitus shared by members of a common group of affiliation, thanks to projection onto outsiders, are the heirs of the vital ties of the child's first cultural environment. Rejecting group beliefs sometimes means running the narcissistic risk of rejection or exclusion. In our analytical institutions, we can observe beliefs in the works of mentors that are difficult to criticize or denounce for their inconsistencies or because they have been superceded by new paradigms. In my early years of institutional experience, I quickly realized that criticizing Freud or certain maîtres of my society could be interpreted as an insufficient understanding of their thought, with the risk of being judged or sent back to the couch in certain contexts. But I also built up my identity as an analyst thanks to shared beliefs in Freud's foundational work and in a training model devoted to the standard treatment. Investment in the scientific and collegial ties of the EPF allowed me to conflictualize my ties of affiliation around a common ethics, the analytical method, and thanks to a common identity as a “member of the IPA”, the institution that regulates our training models.
But while the IPA, as a regulatory body, is subject to majority vote when taking a position on compromises concerning unifying rules for an international psychoanalytic movement, the EPF offers a democratic space free from the need for a common model. Here, we can explore our diverse scientific paradigms – Freudian, Winnicottian, Kleinian, etc. – with respect for difference and on an equal footing, engaging in dialogue between our original analytical languages. A scientific paradigm always has heuristic value, reflecting a consensus around the belief in a certain truth at a given moment. The EPF is a democratic space, dedicated to scientific dialogue, which allows us to explore and question our different paradigms without taking a position, in the freedom of thought of psychoanalysis. What is the origin of our scientific “truths”? Have they been the subject of historical consensus around mentors or leaders? And how have our paradigms been able to evolve or be superseded thanks to openness to other ways of thinking? Do our different schools speak of the same unconscious? What is specifically analytical for a Freudian, a Winnicottian or a Kleinian? These questions and many others are the subject of scientific debates at the EPF. The essence of this democratic dialogue is illustrated by the rule of our Educational Conferences which invite participants in a process of "listening to how colleagues from different training, analytic models and cultures understand and discuss psychoanalysis. This can allow for a significant moment of experience that a familiar teaching model is only one of many" (Red Book).
The IPA must guard against deviations from the international order by proposing consensual rules, while recognizing the diversity of their application in the clinical and theoretical paradigms of local societies. In a democratic order, norms are not passed down unchanged from generation to generation, but reinterpreted by successive generations. This reinterpretation is inevitable and desirable because democracy is reflexive, in the sense that citizens do not accept any norm without subjecting it to critical reflection. The debates at the EPF on the application of the rules of remote analysis between representatives of the different regions of the IPA have allowed us to exchange views in a democratic space dedicated to reflection on our differences. However, the quest for recognition of the unifying beliefs of local institutions has also given rise to conflicts between antagonistic, sometimes irreconcilable visions of the future of psychoanalysis, visions that often may oppose the “pure” against the “impure” in our definition of psychoanalysis. Do these conflicts threaten the democratic order of the IPA by calling into question its work of negotiation and compromise around common standards and visions of our psychoanalytical work?
Democracy navigates a fine line between unity around universal values defended by institutions elected by majority vote, and recognition of community ties that form the basis of divergent cultural identities, criticism of which is necessary to the democratic spirit. Can our ties within local societies be extended to international citizenship? Do the EPF and the IPA represent a call for democracy in their spaces for debate, confrontation, and translation of our languages and original ways of analytical thinking?
References
Elias, Norbert (1939-1987). The society of individuals, University College Dublin Press, 2010 - 224 pages
Freud, S. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE 14. London: Hogarth, pp. 69-102.
Freud S. (1921c). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18. London Hogarth, pp. 69-143.
Grabska K. (2025), Discussion of Eran Rolnik’s communication, “Psychoanalysis needs democracy”, EPF Bulletin 79 p.138-142.
Groen-Prakken H. (1996). Towards a Pan-European Psychoanalytical Federation: On the Development of the Psychoanalytic Movement in Central and Eastern Europe, 1987-1996 EPF. 30th anniversary of the EPF, Bulletin 48.
Manoloupoulos, S. (2025). Psychoanalysis and Euripides’ Suppliant Women, A Tragic Reading of Politics. London: Routledge.
Parsons, M. (2025). Discussion of Laurence Kahn’s paper, “The aberrations of freedom”, EPF Bulletin 79 pp.30-35.
Tocqueville, A. de (2002/1840). Democracy in America, trans. H. Mansfield and D. Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.