Content area
THE MANY PSYCHOHISTORICAL WAYS OF KNOWING In psychohistorical understanding, as in all areas of inquiry, there are many ways of knowing and of articulating description, interpretation, and explanation. In recent decades, narrative, lineal, scholarly discourse has been supplemented by applied story-telling/story-listening (Allcorn and Stein, 2015); psychohistorical poetry (Beisel, 2015; Beisel and Javors, 2021; Petschauer, 2022; Stein, 2013, 2017 [review of Dolores Brandon autobiography], 2024; Stein and Allcorn, 2020, 2021; and visual art (e.g., Sandra Indig, in Stein, 2018). For those familiar with his life and his business, television, and political careers, this entire drama seems to be a single, continuous act, of which Donald Trump is the only or central character, as well as producer, director, stage manager, sound and light manager, and script writer-though he often ad libs deviating from his scripts. CONNECTING THE IMAGERY OF ALICE'S WONDERLAND WITH A SINKHOLE IN CHINA On the face of it, it might seem preposterous that I attempt to make sense of the deepening and all-consuming Age of Trump through the imagery and metaphor of Lewis Carroll's "nonsense" fantasy novel The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1865), together with the geological phenomenon and image of asinkhole in which everything and everyone falls endlessly.
ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to make sense of the ongoing Age of Trump in the US via the genres of allegory, fable, myth, and story-telling, rather than from the more traditional scholarly, narrative, lineal approach. The paper poses and attempts to answer several questions: What is it like for us to live during this mischievous, perilous time in America? How do you make sense of the seeming senselessness of the continuing Age of Trump?
The author explores not only the problematic nature of making sense of chaos, but also how one comes to understand how to begin to accomplish this. The writer's "method" includes the psychohistorian's very style of writing, and how this style itself contributes to the process of making sense of the continuing Age of Trump. By the term "style" I specifically mean an often-conversational mode of story-telling, and the use of fable, allegory, and myth.
I hope to show how a more accessible writing style contributes to the process of making sense, one unburdened by the limits of traditional scholarly writing. My ultimate question is: Does this experiment resonate with you my reader? That is the litmus test of the "success" of this experiment in psychohistory-by-storytelling.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality."
-Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Them
I am "them" to you-
the banishment is
in your eyes,
in the distance
you stand from me,
in the frown
on your face
when I am the object
of your gaze.
How not to make
your judgment
my own,
and become a "them"
to me?
INTRODUCTION: THE MANY PSYCHOHISTORICAL WAYS OF KNOWING
In psychohistorical understanding, as in all areas of inquiry, there are many ways of knowing and of articulating description, interpretation, and explanation. In recent decades, narrative, lineal, scholarly discourse has been supplemented by applied story-telling/story-listening (Allcorn and Stein, 2015); psychohistorical poetry (Beisel, 2015; Beisel and Javors, 2021; Petschauer, 2022; Stein, 2013, 2017 [review of Dolores Brandon autobiography], 2024; Stein and Allcorn, 2020, 2021; and visual art (e.g., Sandra Indig, in Stein, 2018). The present essay approaches the on-going Age of (Donald) Trump through fable, allegory, and myth in the idiom of story-telling (Gabriel, 2000, 2015; Allcorn and Stein, 2015; Allcorn and Stein, 2016).
In traditional scholarship within many social and behavioral science fields, and in applied psychoanalysis, one usually explores these cultural-historical textsand their oftenritualized telling/ enactment in the group or historical era being studied, through analyzing their deeper linguistic, cultural, and unconscious meanings. That is, they are the objects/subjects of inquiry for broader and deeper historical significance. In this paper, by contrast I draw upon these cultural genres themselves as guides to making sense of a chaotic and violent era in US history. I also try to understand their own deeper meanings, but the focus is on fable, myth, and allegory as instruments of understanding.
My approach thus differs from the usual print, scholarly, newscast television, and radio journalism approaches to providing readers descriptions, interpretations, and explanations. I ask: What can depending on stories, images, metaphors, and personal experiences of free-floating anxiety contribute to making sense of Trump, Season 2? I do not reject the conventional and familiar narrative approaches of journalism and academic writing. Rather, I try to supplement, broaden, and deepen our ways of understanding the surreal world in which we are immersed, and which has come to dwell within our minds and imaginations, creating an anxiety-ridden inner world.
Scholarly and journalistic accounts of the Age of Trump take the subject head on, so to speak. Stories, allegory, images come at sense making, let's say, from the side, indirectly rather than directly. An indirect way of knowing the same subject enriches what we know. My modus operandi, so to speak, will be largely psychohistorical story-telling in an often-conversational mode (which, when you think of it, was often Sigmund Freud's style of making his clinical and theoretical argument with the reader as interlocutor and companion).
INTHE BEGINNING
To begin with, consider that the very idea that the second term of Donald Trump's Presidency might be the Second Act and Season 2 of a television series. Is this a misnomer? For those familiar with his life and his business, television, and political careers, this entire drama seems to be a single, continuous act, of which Donald Trump is the only or central character, as well as producer, director, stage manager, sound and light manager, and script writer-though he often ad libs deviating from his scripts.
All his life, it has been difficult to separate the character, for example in The Apprentice, from the person. Often, they seem fused, interchangeable. So, is his "real" lifea drama, a movie, a personified metaphor? We never seem to know if his anger and self-absorbed speeches are delivered by the character or himself. Is there a true or false self or only a fused self?
Terry Bollea, who has also blended entertainment and reality as Hulk Hogan, also spoke on July 18, 2024, endorsing his fellow wrestler/entertainer at the Republican National Convention and performed his signature move of tearing off his shirt. "The Donald" and "The Hulk," I suggest share much in common by blurring reality.
Maybe, the current era is itself a live "Reality TV show" starring, written, produced, and directed by Trump, in which we never knew where the character of Trump leaves off, and his "real" person or self, begins. The Apprentice ended with his stern "You're fired," a now signature phrase for his style in life and politics as reclassifications and terminations now threaten the federal government's workforce.
Perhaps for him the mask is the face. The "real person" is the character of Donald Trump, his audience, electorate, and constituents-count on. His loyal audience has "bonded" with him-or is it his character that holds up his narcissism through their groveling loyalty? They do so with accolades of his boundless greatness, so that he in turn can rescue them from loneliness, guilt, shame, fear of the other, and anxiety. In his "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) slogan, he promises to make them feel wonderful about him, themselves, and our homeland.
CONNECTING THE IMAGERY OF ALICE'S WONDERLAND WITH A SINKHOLE IN CHINA
On the face of it, it might seem preposterous that I attempt to make sense of the deepening and all-consuming Age of Trump through the imagery and metaphor of Lewis Carroll's "nonsense" fantasy novel The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1865), together with the geological phenomenon and image of asinkhole in which everything and everyone falls endlessly.
I ask you, my reader, to be patient with me as the "story line" of this essay emerges. The seemingly bizarre and senseless might become a frighteningly accurate canvas of the Age of Trump. Ask yourself: What kind of nonsense is the age of Trump? Followed by: How can we try to make sense of it?
Let me try to connect Alice's rabbit holes with sink holes in my story line. Please bear with me. On November 16th, 2024, I saw on Facebook a beautiful but eerie photo of a huge sink hole in Hubei, China, three hundred meters deep, at the bottom of which was located an isolated, ancient forest. The mouth of the sinkhole was sufficiently wide to permit a large beam of sunlight to illumine the world below. The image fascinated me and haunted me (Novak, 2024).
During this time, I was also reading about Alice and the strange world of Wonderland. As my mind wandered while I studied this Facebook photo, I began to imagine a bottomless sinkhole. Once an object or person entered it, they would fall for all eternity, helpless to stop the downward motion. Psychiatrically, endless falling is one of the most terrifying fantasies and dream hallucinations.
My mind (imagination) connected the dots between the two worlds. Although Wonderland and its residents were sure they stood on solid ground, the entirety of the journey into Wonderland was in fact a free-fall into a deeper and deeper, all-consuming fantasy. Reality was left behind.
Lewis Carroll's Alice fell down the rabbit hole into Wonderland-her only reality. Likewise, Trump is the Reality TV Pied Piper whose machismo charisma leads us down a political rabbit hole into the thrall of a Wonderland, a show where the Character is the Person, and he its producer and soon its Commander in Chief. But might this Wonderland ultimately be a trap, even as its true believers experience it as a redemption. The one who proclaims Only I can save you might turn out to the one who leads us into a bottomless political and cultural sinkhole.
ALTERNATIVE FACTS AND THE WONDERLAND PRINCIPLE (UNREALITY)
Historically, the current public version of this political Wonderland tale began with presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway coining the term alternative facts (realities) January 22nd, 2017. When confronted by the disparity between Trump's assertion that he had the largest presidential inaugural crowd in history (two days earlier), and although observers and journalists noted how sparse the attendance was, Conway's solution to these two conflicting realities was through the magic of language.
If the world did not live up to Trumps grandiose need, he would make it conform by reinventing it (similar to the results of the later 2020 election). The 2017 world of alternative facts, evolved into what has become a post and post post-factual world (Allcorn, 2024; Allcorn and Stein, 2017) in which there are no truths.
To borrow from George Orwell's 1945 novel, Animal Farm, according to the Principle of Wonderland, "Some alternative facts are more equal than others." The dictum of "Speak truth to authority" both becomes meaningless and is stood on its head to become "Speak power to truth" to impose one's own "alternative truth," and to negate, disqualify, refute, repudiate, destroy any other claim to Truth. Power and authority become the ultimate enforcer of reality.
The presidential Reality TV star becomes the only legitimate, acceptable, and ultimate Truth: The Wonderland Principle becomes the dogma of orthodoxy. There is, it turns out, no escape from Wonderland. The rabbit hole has been sealed shut behind us. Escaping it is soon forgotten. There is nothing left outside of Wonderland. Anyone who claims otherwise isa MAGA heretic.
World history is littered with tragic rabbit holes and bottomless sinkholes and pits of destruction and chaos. Consider a familiar one. Early in World War II, despite many German generals' misgivings, Adolf Hitler launched, on June 22nd, 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the massive invasion of the Soviet Union, expecting a quick victory and Soviet capitulation.
His was the dream of easy conquest for Lebensraum (Living Space), to feed hungry Germany from the vastgranary of south Russia and Ukraine. Removing the "inferior" Russians from their land would provide space for German resettlement. However, this fantasy turned into a costly nightmare of bloody sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, harsh Russian Winters, and the slaughter and starvation of hundreds of thousands of German and Soviet soldiers and civilians. Hitler's Wonderland dream world of German domination of all Russia turned into a calamitous sinkhole that led to German defeat in the east.
Fast forward to the Age of (Donald) Trump in the US. I have already mentioned Trump'sinsistent distortion of attendance at his 2017 Inauguration. His repeated slogan, "Only I can save you" has been stood on its head many times. Much like life in Wonderland, he sows chaos everywhere. His hesitations, inactions, and excuses in early 2020, ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of American lives by thwarting preparation for the COVID-19 pandemic.
At first, he dismissed the spreading virus as little more than the flu. He soon refused to assemble a cadre of health care professionals to be ready to be deployed anywhere in the U.S. once the plague hit in full force. His rationale was that he was a businessman, and you do not hire people to sit around doing nothing. Preparation of every kind lagged behind the reality of an emerging pandemic.
After COVID hit with full force, he floated the idea of using disinfectants and bleach as a remedy, which misled countless people because of his authority and charisma. He suggested only "voluntary" face covering. He silenced his national COVID expert, Anthony Fauci, MD, and official health agencies, from reporting current statistics to prevent spreading "bad news" and "lying" about public information, all of which would reflect poorly on him. There were countless times he dwelled in his own fantasy world-foisting the Wonderland Principle on the nation and hastening the nation's falling into the sinkhole of out-of-control disease spread and the deaths of greater than a million people.
A final, familiar example: In early September 2019 Hurricane Dorian approached Florida from the Caribbean. Ultimately, national, and local meteorological forecasting agencies predicted it would carve a path of destruction up the south-east coast of states. Infamously, with the stroke of a Sharpie, Trump altered the arrow on the map to point toward Alabama- which forecasters had considered but quickly rejected as Dorian's path. Perhaps the Sharpie will also write on the map, Gulf of America.
Trump and his supporters inside government pressured some agencies to capitulate and say that movement toward Alabama was possible. He forbade these scientifically-based agencies to publicize the south-east coast northern trajectory. The silencing put millions of people in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and northward in peril, while needlessly frightening people in Alabama.
In the face of Trump's-often uncontested-sense of entitlement to create reality in his own image ("strong and powerful"), the fate and lives of millions of people became irrelevant. His self-appointed right to change the map does not consider who all might be affected. In early January 2024, Trump's expansive sense of self expanded to even more grandiose proportions: e.g., the need to annex Panama, Greenland, and Canada for strategic economicand military purposes.
Following my train of thought, what seemed like a fall down Alice's rabbit hole is a fall into the end of the reality principle, a fall into believing make-believe endlessly created by the central character in the Trump drama, Trump himself. This descent into endless unreality in turn is all about the realities of power.
WONDERLAND-BY-COMMAND AND THE LURE OF TOTALITARIANISM
Trump's prerogative-mirrored and intensified by his supporters-is thus Wonderland by command, and the authoritarian enforcement of fantasy. "Alternative facts" become the only facts. There is no alternative to the "alternative." Put another way: "My way, or the highway," as many corporate CEOs have proclaimed. This leads to the entire surreal Wonderland falling further and further down the sinkhole away from accurate reality testing-becoming its own and only permissible reality.
Lewis Carroll's novel, Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1865) is a dream fantasy world. Recall that Alice's entire adventure is itself a dream, from which Alice awakens. Trump's Wonderland requires that everyone instead stay asleep. The Age of Trump transforms fantasy into reality, becoming the only "sense." Over time, Wonderland itself is consumed by its own fantasy. When Alice and the rest of us fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, that is not the end of it. Even worse, the dream world of Wonderland itself continues its and our descent into a sinkhole. As this happens, into what ordinary human political and cultural terrain do we fall? The place is quite familiar today: we dwell in it in the Age of Trump.
It is hardly coincidence that several writers have recently and independently invoked the (1956) classic science-fiction horror movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a way to portray and evoke the feeling state of being possessed and one's very self being obliterated by a menacing, unstoppable malevolent external force that invades and overtakes one's life. It is both the dread and realization of an all-encompassing, total consumption, of one's individuality and of an entire society. Its world is Wonderland-and its endless falling through the sinkhole by another name.
Strange at first as it might sound, the Wonderland Principle is a version of the commonplace Unreality Principle, which in turn is politically an unmistakable form of totalitarianism, though presented in the guise of an alluring fantasy world (Stein and Allcorn, 2010, 2011a, 2011b).
Hannah Arendt, in her classic 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was writing of her experience of Hitler's Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union ("Russia") but her insights are as timeless as those in George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel 1984.
"The key point in Arendt's statement is that as the lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything." When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble-a phrase Arendt employs in her essay, "Truth and Politics." In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world-and the category of truth versus falsehood isamong the mental means to this end-is being destroyed. (Arendt, quoted in Berkowitz, 2024)
"The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism." (Berkowitz, 2024).
Further:
What totalitarian rulers seek is not only the eradication of political opposition but the complete transformation of the political sphere into a realm of total domination, achieved by eliminating all intellectual initiative. This process includes the replacement of all first-rate talents, regardless of their political loyalties, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is the best guarantee of their loyalty. (1951/1967 revised ed., p. 339)
ATENUOUS CONCLUSION: CONNECTING THE DOTS BETWEEN THE AGE OF TRUMP, WONDERLAND, BOTTOMLESS SINKHOLES, AND TOTALITARIANISM
Perhaps by this point, our journey into trying to make sense of our trying times isno longer outlandish to you, my patient reader. The saga began with the fantasy and fable about what it is like to live in the Age of Trump, and then trying to help make sense of it through the lens of Wonderland and a bottomless sinkhole. This in turn led us into the not so wonderful land of totalitarianism. The dotted lines are there and have long been present-it is a matter of stepping back from and up beyond the rabbit hole in order to recognize and connect the reality of scattered dots. This journey has taken us to a frightening place.
Is there any consolation, any hope, from having made this long trek toward unmasking un-reality? My wager is that if there is even a slight chance that we as a nation might awaken from our nightmare, we must first recognize it to be the nightmare that it is. How might we begin to do this? We can imagine and see beyond it, only if we can imagine the rabbit hole in the first place. We can begin to heal as a society, only if we step back and correctly diagnose the social and political disease process.
To do so, we must emotionally as well as cognitively, "re-frame" Wonderland and the descent into it. Ironically and paradoxically, we will need tore-imagine this "post- and post post-factual" (Allcorn, 2024; Allcorn and Stein, 2017) world of "alternative facts" as the deceptive lie it has been all along-designed not to liberate us, but to enslave us.
Symbolism, allegory, myth, fable, and story-telling are, I suggest, useful methodological psychohistorical instruments for having a sense of what it is like to live in an alternate reality, Wonderland, in which its preeminent magician of distraction exclaims "Only I can save you," (from me) is the very one who is leading our culture-historical period deeper into the abyss.
Howard E Stein is an applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropologist; psychohistorian; organizational consultant; and poet. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, US, where he taught for nearly 35 years. Author, co-author, and editor of some 35 books, he has published 12 books and chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which is Standing in the Chaos (IPBooks, 2024). He has published several hundred papers, chapters, and poems. Heis poet laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology, and Psychohistorical Poet Laureate. He can be reached at [email protected].
REFERENCES
Allcorn, S. (2024). "A Post 'Post-Factual' World." The Journal of Psychohistory. 52(1) Summer 2024: 54-61.
Allcorn, S. and Stein, H.E (2015). The Dysfunctional Workplace: Theory, Stories, and Practice. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2015.
Allcorn, S. and Stein, H.D. (2016). "Storytelling: An Approach to Knowing Organizations and Their People," Organisational and Social Dynamics 16(1) 2016: 19-38.
Allcorn, S. and Stein, H.E. (2017). "The Post-Factual World of the 2016 American Presidential Election: The Good, the Bad, and the Deplorable." The Journal of Psychohistory. 44(4) Spring 2017: 310-318.
"The Apprentice." Reality TV Series. 2004-2017. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364782/ Accessed 1-7-2024.
Arendt, H. (1951/1976). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (renewed edition.
Berkowitz, R. (2024). "On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations." Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/ on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotations- 2024-08-04.
David R. Beisel, Editor (2015). Wounded Centuries. [anthology of poems] Nyack, New York: Grolier Poetry Press and Circumstantial Productions.
Beisel, D. and Javors, 1. (2021). Genres of the Imagination. Nyack, NY: Circumstantial Productions. 2021.
Carroll. L. (1865). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Oxford, UK: Macmillan.
Facebook. November 16th, 2024. https://www.facebook.com/HistoryPhotosOfOurWorld/ photos/a-vast-sinkhole-over-290-meters-deep-in-xuanen-county-hubei-chinahousing-a-uniq/490641237291781/ Accessed 1-5-2025.
Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Gabriel, Y. (2015). "Narratives and Stories in Organizations: A Longer Introduction." http:// www.yiannisgabriel.com/2015/narratives-and-stories-in-organizations.html?m=1. Accessed 1-9-2024.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/ Accessed 1/5/2025.
Novak, K. (2024). Breathtaking ancient forest world is discovered 630ft below ground in sinkhole in China. Vt. https://vt.co/world-news/breathtaking-ancient-forest-worldis-discovered-630ft-below-ground-in-sinkhole-in-china. Accessed 1-7-2025.
Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. London: Secker & Warburg.
Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.
Petschauer, PW. (2022). Listen to Rarely Heard Voices. (psychohistorical dialogues). New York: MindMend Publications.
Stein, H.E (2013). "Poetry and Psychohistory: Introduction to the Confluence of Poetry and Psychohistory," Clio's Psyche 20(3) Winter 2013: pp. 288-292.
Stein, H. E. "Poetry and Storytelling as Psychohistory." Review Essay of Dolores Brandon. The Root Is Bitter, The Root Is Sweet: A Memoir." Second Edition. New York: ORI Academic Press, 2016 (Orig. 2000. Sky Blue Press). The Journal of Psychohistory. 45(1) Summer 2017: 66-69.
Stein, H.E (2018). Centre and Circumference. Paintings by Sandra Indig. New York: MindMend Publishing.
Stein, H.E. (2024). "Applied Poetry and the Nature of Truth in Psychohistory." Clio's Psyche. 2024. 31(1) Fall 2024: 55-64.
Stein, H. and Allcorn, S. (2010). "The Unreality of American Deregulation." The Journal of Psychohistory 38(1): 27-48.
Stein, H. and Allcorn, S. (2011a). "The Unreality of Deregulation: The Cultural Psychodynamics of an Enduring Myth." In The Study of Identity as a Concept and Social Construct in Behavioral and Social Science Research: Inter-Disciplinary and Global Perspectives. Lorenzo Cherubini, Ed. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press.
Stein, H. and Allcorn, S. (2011b). "The Unreality Behind the Ideology of Deregulation." Psychology and Education 48(1 & 2): 1-15.
Stein, H.E. and Allcorn, S. (2020). The Psychodynamics of Toxic Organizations: Applied Poetry, Stories, and Analysis. Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom: Routledge, June 2020.
Stein, H.E and Allcorn, S. (2021). "Accessing the Psychodynamics of Organisations Through Applied Organisational Poetry," Organisational and Social Dynamics. 21(2) 242-259.
Stein, H. E. and Allcorn, S. (2023). Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press.
Copyright Association for Psychohistory, Inc. 2025