ABSTRACT
The concept of democracy has played an important role in psychology – not least in social psychology. This began during the late 1930s in the United States as a reaction to Nazism and Stalinism; after the war it grew into the group and democracy movement culminating in the 1960s and 1970s and revolutionizing – in both immediate and more enduring ways – education, the thinking on management and organizations, psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Democracy is both an organization form, that is, a method for coordinating and leading the activities of a given group, and – in a more fleeting sense – a core value of Western culture, that is, an ideology, a mental state and an as yet a vaguely defined atmosphere in a social context. In post-war psychology we see examples of both uses of the word, but it was the latter sense, spearheaded by Kurt Lewin, that became the dominant term. In his 1950 essay ‘Some thoughts on the meaning of the word “Democracy”’, Winnicott reflects on what conditions have to be met for a society organized as a parliamentary democracy to be workable. Drawing on a family model, he refers to the elected representative as a ‘temporary parent’ and calls the voters ‘children’.
