This week the always insightful Maria Popova posted an article that speaks to the societal tension that we are experiencing in America today. She cites an essay written in 1958 by the "reliably revelatory pediatrician turned psychiatrist Donald Winnicott (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971)." In it he investigates democracy not as a political but as a psychological phenomenon.

"The essence of democratic machinery is the free vote (secret ballot)," says Winnicott. "The point of this is that it ensures the freedom of the people to express deep feelings, apart from conscious thoughts. In the exercise of the secret vote, the whole responsibility for action is taken by the individual, if he is healthy enough to take it. The vote expresses the outcome of the struggle within himself, the external scene having been internalized and so brought into association with the interplay of forces in his own personal inner world. That is to say, the decision as to which way to vote is the expression of a solution of a struggle within himself."

A healthy democracy is dependent on "sufficient maturity in the emotional development of a sufficient proportion of the individuals that comprise it for there to exist an innate tendency towards the creation and re-creation and maintenance of the democratic machinery." 

He goes on to describe those without such maturity as antisocial. Then he asks "What proportion of antisocial individuals can a society contain without submergence of innate democratic tendency?"

By Winnicott's estimation the creation of the necessary “innate democratic factor” begins with “the ordinary man and woman, and the ordinary, common-place home." It is the work of parenting. And this is just the second time Americans can vote for a female presidential candidate. Yet 66 years ago he wrote: "In psychoanalytical and allied work it is found that all individuals (men and women) have in reserve a certain fear of WOMAN."

ARTICLE: Winnicott on the Psychology of Democracy, the Most Dangerous Type of Person, and the Unconscious Root of Resisting Women Leaders