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The article uses a psychosocial perspective to explore the underlying nature of the lived experience of bearing witness to historical events. Identification with the subjects of these events being studied is accompanied by empathy and by defensive psychodynamics such as projection and transference. This research project revisits an example of a past traumatic bearing of witness to an organizational atrocity and of what can be learned from embracing the risk of being retraumatized. We ask: What sense can be made of psychohistorians revisiting contemporarily experienced history, not only from an imagined detached distance, but also from a subjective experience-near, less than safe distance that may lead to relying on psychological defenses that distort the work of psychohistorians? More broadly, this paper contributes to psychohistorical methods in that bearing witness can be considered to be a specific form of observation, one grounded in the researcher's psychosocial self-awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I find myself being resident in an ahistorical Orwellian and movie-like ground hog day repetitive cycle of bearing witness to the American political scene. This addendum revisits, consistent with this cycle, my earlier paper on sentience groups. "Sentience In Contemporary Conservative American Politics" that was published in this Journal in 2020. It made the argument that sentience groups exist in many forms where the bonds are of an emotional nature but can become rationalized by formulating them into ideological perspectives (backward engineering). This sociopolitical dynamic provides a basis for acting on these shared emotions where, for example, MAGA paranoid leaders see that there are enemies everywhere that must be defended against by constructing boundaries, barriers, and walls to maintain their sentience bonds and their group's "purity." The accompanying fears and threats have become the basis for these shared social bonds that create a binary polarized societal distribution. Now in 2024 the binary political landscape is one that is hard to believe. It is filled with hard to imagine metaphoric rabbit holes that lead to what are hard to imagine possibilities within the MAGA sentience world--not dissimilar to the failures to imagine that are said to have led to 9/11 (Allcorn, 2024). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017, The Post-Factual World of the 2016 American Presidential Election: The Good, the Bad, and the Deplorable was published (Allcorn & Stein, 2017). The article explored the contributions that object relations theory could make to understanding a world split apart and polarized by spin and lies that become fact creating a larger context of divergent right vs left realities. Facts and accurate reality testing were becoming of little value having been compromised by in part unconscious psychosocial elements (Allcorn & Diamond, 2023; Schafer, 1992). In 2024 these political and psychosocial dynamics have led to a post post-factual world where "reality" can indeed be stranger than fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]