Prelude
British Object Relations theory was initiated by Melanie Klein through her introduction of internal objects in the 1920s. The Controversial Discussions in the British Society during WW2 (1941 – 1945) examined whether Klein’s innovative formulations negated the Classical Freudian concepts (Glover 1945). Donald Winnicott began his revisions of both Freudian and Kleinian perspectives from 1945, and as I previously suggested, had forged a distinct new clinical psychoanalytical paradigm by 1971.
The specificity of Winnicott’s object relations theory emphasises the Mother’s primary role as the facilitating psychic environment through psychic survival-of-the-object (Abram 2023). Thus, internal subjective-object relations evolve in the earliest parent-infant relationship i.e. the Mother’s psyche-body. The father in her mind ensures that she will be the object who survives the infant’s ruthless early self.
The subjective intrapsychic surviving object is inaugurated in the earliest psychic development due to the Mother’s capacity to hold and contain her infant’s primordial needs and communications. In contrast, the Mother’s failures at the beginning cause the establishment of a subjective intrapsychic non surviving object. Both internal surviving and non surviving objects govern the development of the internal world of object relations and the sense of Self.
I propose, therefore, that the surviving object determines an internal democratic structure of object relations while the non surviving object determines a totalitarian structure of object relations. Each distinct object governs the sense of Self/Me.
Thus, individual internal object relationships that have evolved in the context of the good enough family psychic structure are, in health, democratic. In contrast, the family that fails to be good enough to facilitate the evolving nascent psyche will result in totalitarian object relations. Since the surviving and non surviving objects are in each individual it follows that both democratic and totalitarian states of mind prevail in each of us.
Founded on this perspective it follows that the individual will evolve, in the healthy family psychic structure into a Democratic Self. The alternative, in a failing family psychic structure, will evolve into a Totalitiarian Self. Both alternative Selves will take their place in the outside world resulting in either democratic societies or totalitarian societies (Winnicott 1950). To retain a democratic object relations is much more of a struggle than to retain a totalitarian set of object relations.
The Democratic Self constitutes a (proposed) psychoanalytic concept arising from the success of healthy developmental achievement. It follows therefore, that the ultimate gain of a good enough psychoanalytic treatment will result in a maturing and evolving Democratic Self.
The EPF Today
When I think about the European Psychoanalytical Federation, I think of a living institutional federation composed of 44 IPA Societies, living and working in Europe, with their distinct languages and psychoanalytic traditions in the context of strong national identities and sensibilities as well as a multitude of transferences towards each and every Society and the EPF.
The EPF structures that have evolved since 1966 have been democratically organised and the recent adjustments to the EPF’s Articles of Association under Belgian law, has strengthened the democratic function of the elected Board of Directors and its responsibility to the EPF members (Presidents of the 44 Societies = General Assembly). The IPA continues to remain the stable regulatory body for all EPF members and this liberates the EPF to develop its purpose as a scientific forum that places psychoanalytic exchange at the centre of its identity.
The federated structure of EPF requires that the Board of Directors respect the autonomy of member societies while sustaining a common psychoanalytic space. This is what gives the EPF leadership role its particular psychological density. In the role of President, one is asked to represent unity without erasing difference, to hold authority without demanding submission, to facilitate disagreement without allowing disagreement to become fragmentation, and to sustain continuity while simultaneosly facilitating change; not change for change's sake but when it becomes clear that change is required for improvement of systems that no longer function.
Democratic life is sustained not only by rules, elections, mandates and assemblies, but by conditions: by a sufficiently reliable setting, by psychic survival of objects, by the interplay between inner and outer reality, and by the capacity to recognise the Other (individual or organisation) as separate, without losing the thread of interpersonal relating. The praxis of democratic work depends on the psychic capacity to tolerate ambivalence and disappointment, to distinguish conflict from sadistic destructivity, and to accept that no single person can possess the whole truth of the instititution. In this sense, democracy has an object-relational foundation; more particularly, a facilitating environment is required for institutional life.
What kind of Self is required for democratic leadership in any given organisation? The answer, I am proposing, is an evolved and open Democratic Self. By this nomenclature, I do not mean a self that is simply liberal, tolerant, or procedurally courteous. I mean a Self that is organised around an ethic of internal democratic object relations with highly evolved capacities: to hold without impinging, to survive being attacked, to protect potential space, and to create institutional conditions in which everyone feels free to think, speak, disagree, and psychoanalytically play in an atmosphere of trust and enjoyment. These are the qualities of democratic values that are internalised by each individual, family, society, country and continent.
The Democratic Self
Democratic leadership cannot be adequately described by constitutional procedure, consultation, or administrative competence alone. It also depends upon the creation of a sufficiently reliable institutional environment in which difference, conflict, limitation, and uncertainty is borne without retreating to omnipotent control, compliance, divisions, or retaliatory, aggressive withdrawal.
I suggest that a mature Democratic Self is a requirement in order to lead a democratically structured organisation. I consider that the EPF leadership roles - the Board of Directors - is a place in which the intersections between the interpersonal and the interpsychic has to be managed by each individual. Each leader needs to be capable of being used without being destroyed, of holding without possessing, and of sustaining a potential space in which all members of the BoD and the General Assembly may find reflection of their own spontaneous gestures and individual voices that contributes to a strong sense of belonging.
The Democratic Self is not to be misunderstood as an idealised personality type. Moreover, to be a Democratic Self is not a static position. I imagine it as a developmental process of individuation that evolves further as an institutional capacity, and one that must be found and found again under the pressures of institutional life. This is a Self that is sufficiently real and open without being compliant; boundaried without being rigid, and imaginative enough to recognise that the Other’s gesture may be spontaneous and meaningful even, and especially, when it disturbs one’s own inner organisation. In this sense, the Democratic Self grows in the leadership role due to the institutional demands. This is akin to the evolution of a Democratic Self in the analytic relationship, for both patient and analyst. In fact without the analyst’s psychic work in relation to their patient no true analytic work can be carried out.
I have also come to think that the Democratic Self is a Self that can accept limitations without treating limitation as humiliation. In institutional life, limitation might often be experienced as an injury. In the presidential role such limits may arrive as frustrations, but they may also be reminders of reality. An omnipotent attitude will experience them as obstruction while the Democratic Self, when it is well functioning, experiences them as an important condition of trustworthy institutional life.
Democratic Object Relations and Democratic Life
The specificity of Winnicott’s object relations theory is based on the premise that psychic life is constituted through the Mother’s psyche-body. The infant’s nascent psyche emerges through the experience of being held, recognised, mirrored, and survived. These early relational patterns contribute to the internal world of each individual and shape how authority, dependence, difference and loss are later worked through. In institutional life, as in analysis, such patterns are not simply repeated but they are reanimated because of the transference. The organisation thus becomes a place where internal object relating will be externalised. Self-awareness of the reanimation of the psyche offers new opportunities for the Democratic Self to strengthen and deepen as difficulties are worked through again and again. This is not repetition of pathological object relations but rather an opportunity for inner change.
The praxis of democracy requires a capacity to experience the Other as an object in their own right, not merely as an extension of one’s wishes or as a container for one’s disowned anxieties. Democratic relating depends upon the movement from object relating to object use (Winnicott 1969). The object must survive destruction; that is the Other must survive disagreement, aggression, and projection without retaliating in kind or disappearing into compliance. A democratic institution is one in which people can discover that the object survives: that a colleague, committee, board, President, or society can be challenged and still remain available for future work. This survival is not passive endurance. It is the condition that allows the object to become real because of non retaliation.
The EPF President as the primary leadership role in the EPF, therefore involves a distinctive form of survival. As President, one must survive idealisation and disappointment, gratitude and complaint, urgency and suspicion. Survival here does not mean invulnerability, nor does it mean silent suffering. It means trying to remain alive, thoughtful, present and boundaried when the role is used as a site of projection. When authority survives in this sense, a further democratic experience becomes possible i.e. the experience that authority can be questioned without being destroyed and can respond without becoming persecutory.
The EPF as a Potential Space
The vitality of the EPF is perpetuated by each and every leader of the General Assembly alongside the scientific and administrative work of the EPF Committees. The EPF may therefore be understood as a potential space: a shared arena in which analysts are invited to think, translate, discuss, and create. Potential space can be fragile without a reliable setting, because it can be damaged by excessive control. Potential space requires freedom, although it could collapse when freedom is not safe-guarded. It requires a leader who can attend to the frame while not occupying all the space within it. The value of such space is that it is neither simply mine nor simply yours rather it is when something can be discovered because as a collective something is being co-created (Widlöcher ([2006] 2012). To co-create requires the active engagement of the Other to make this possible.
In this sense, I increasingly think of democratic leadership as a form of facilitating environmental provision. It creates conditions under which others can take up their own capacities. The EPF President does not need to be the most original thinker in every room, nor the final arbiter of every theoretical dispute. Rather, the President’s task is to hold open a space in which analytic thinking can occur across broad differences. This includes ordinary acts: chairing meetings with fairness, protecting minority voices, noticing exclusions, managing time, ensuring translation, clarifying procedure, and returning conflict to a level at which it can be thought through rather than acted out. These ordinary responsibilities are the institutional equivalents of the analytic setting: unobtrusively facilitating.
The metaphor of holding is useful only if it is not sentimentalised. Holding in institutional life requires firmness, interruption, decision, and refusal. A democratic holding environment is not one in which everyone is gratified. It is one in which frustration can be metabolised because the frame is reliable enough and because authority is exercised in the service of work rather than narcissistic possession. The leader’s task is not to prevent frustration, but to prevent frustration from becoming gross impingement, persecution or collapse.
Conclusion: Democractic living as an Analytic endeavour
I consider that the Democratic Self is an internal condition and a process for democratic institutional living and therefore it is a developmental achievement that needs to continue to evolve because process is never static. Without the capacity to not only survive projections, but also to grow from them by the inner psychic work of democratic object relations, the leader will be hampered in her leadership role.
The EPF, as a democratically led and democratically functioning psychoanalytic institution makes an enormous contribution to Europe. In a continent marked by linguistic diversity, historical trauma, national difference and recurrent pressures towards polarisation, our psychoanalytic federation has a responsibility to model forms of relating in which difference can be neither denied nor fetishised, but worked though and worked with. Democratic object relations are not abstract ideals. They are active in the way in which criticism is received, how translation is valued, how authority is transferred, and how the institution survives the aggression from those who love it.
To lead democratically, is to make oneself available as an object who can be used; to hold a space without owning it; to accept the wound of limitation; and to trust that institutional creativity emerges not from unanimity, but from the difficult work of remaining in relationships and sustaining a hopeful approach that tensions can be worked out with other democratic selves who participate in the Federation.
The presidential task as I have come to understand and continue to work on, is to provide, as far as is possible, a good enough institutional environment in which the members of the Federation feel free to think psychoanalytically while disseminating psychoanalysis. In this way the EPF’s collective work is a meaningful and even revolutionary contribution to Europe and the wider world.