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In psychoanalysis we work with very interesting phenomena: The old external objects of childhood are internalized and live their internal life in different structures of mind nearly unchanged during our adulthood and old age, too. Our fantasies add to them a flavor of myth which should be worked through in psychoanalytic process, and a resulting change involves usually a more realistic picture of old objects. But not all people can change their internal objects, although some moves and corrections are possible under ordinary life conditions.
People in Eastern and Central Europe live in a quite extraordinary historical time: the change of governing authoritarian or totalitarian social and economic rules and conditions into more liberal and individualistic ones. In practice it means that they bring their old internal objects into new social space with different boundaries and requirements. Metaphorically they bring Kafka's “castle” (as a schema for interpretation and anticipation of external phenomena and as an organizing principle of their internal reality) into a democratic space. No wonder that left-wing political parties, which are mostly less liberal, returned to the state governments a short time after the revolutions at the end of the 1980s. Such a solution represents at least a smaller gap between internal objects (with totalitarian characteristics) and external objects (charismatic and mostly authoritarian political leaders).
In previous articles I have used the concept of the totalitarian object in order to refer to specific qualities of these primitive objects, which are the building blocks of the totalitarian mind (Šebek, 1996, 1997). Unfortunately, there is relatively little literature in psychoanalysis on totalitarism. The concept of totalitarism is not a part of the technical psychoanalytic vocabulary, but it is a sociological and politological concept. There is interesting literature that exists, for instance, Arendt's (1951/1973) work. In the psychology