Guest Post by Mimi K. Stokes

October 11, 2022

Guest Post by Mimi K. Stokes

My parents’ marriage was a marriage of Psychology and Democracy.

My late father was the former US Attorney General, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who confronted George Wallace at the University of Alabama and later got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts through Congress. My mother was a Freudian psychoanalyst, painter, and poet. My father had deep respect for my mother’s psychological intelligence and creative giftedness, and her psychological perspective influenced his understanding of democracy.

Influenced by my mother, my father developed the view that people could have psychological issues that made them vote for someone they identified with, someone like them, in an unconscious act in which an individual votes to empower themselves.

What he believed was needed for a functioning democracy and free society was to vote for an Other who had qualities of character, knowledge, and experience, to sustain and evolve the US democratic project of a free and just society. He saw a vote driven by unconscious identification—and needs for power for oneself, whatever the source of those unconscious needs—as undermining Equality and Civil Rights. Racists voted for racists like them; white men voted for white men like them, further embedding structural, endemic racism and sexism in society. The unconscious citizen who makes an unconscious vote was, in his view, a danger to the democratic process.

What was needed was a civic psychology that could address the internal factors of unconscious voting.

My father saw a vital need for a form of civic psychology to overcome generations of the living experience of racism. He saw racism as being passed down in families, from one generation to the next, deeply embedded in the intimate realm of family, making healing the long US history of racism a complex ‘family matter.’

That racism could be healed and transcended, he believed possible. Or, at least, he believed that we had to believe it was possible, or else we could not declare ourselves authentically committed to the democratic project.

He believed that whites had a vital role to play in a healing transcendence of racism.  His thinking was that sustaining the Civil and Voting Rights acts depended on whites tirelessly and passionately advocating for the rights of Blacks to vote. By definition, racism gives whites more power and agency. Democracy, therefore, gives whites the moral, and ethical responsibility to use their agency to advocate for the rights of others, not only for oneself.  And so, again, we are at my father’s fundamental view that democracy is about Self and Other, not just Self.

If I had to give a name to my father’s ’psychologized’ democracy, it would be an Empathic Democracy. My father often lamented that the North had no idea of the living experience of the South; whites had no idea of the living experience of Blacks; men had no idea of the living experience of women because listening to each other’s lived experiences, with empathy, respect, and dignifying each other’s emotional experiences as citizens, was not a democratic US value. 

In a sense, my father saw the therapist as having a skill that citizens and leaders needed to transfer from therapy to democracy. US democracy needed the therapist’s skill of listening to the emotional experience of an Other with empathy, respect, and an attitude of amelioration and commitment to relieve the suffering of a citizen-Other. 

“Empathic Democracy” is not a phrase my father ever used. As I said, it is my name for the kind of democracy that my father and mother’s marriage of Psychology and Democracy awakened in him—or engendered in him, through the union of feminine and masculine, anima and animus, of a sacred, inner, marriage of psychology and democracy inside of him that mirrored his marriage with my mother.

Guest Post by Mimi K. Stokes