SHORT COMMUNICATION

https://doi.org/10.5005/jp-journals-11001-0077
Eastern Journal of Psychiatry
Volume 24 | Issue 2 | Year 2024

Alice in Wonderland and Psychiatry: A Deep Dive

Sumana Baruah1, Himabrata Das2

1,2Department of Psychiatry, Silchar Medical College and Hospital, Silchar, Assam, India

Corresponding Author: Himabrata Das, Department of Psychiatry, Silchar Medical College and Hospital, Silchar, Assam, India, e-mail: Himabrata.das1212@gmail.com

Received on: 20 September 2024; Accepted on: 12 October 2024; Published on: 16 November 2024

ABSTRACT

Alice in Wonderland is a classic children’s tale written by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865. Alice slips into a fantastical dream while on her afternoon nap, where under the guise of childlike imagination, several nuances of psychology and psychiatry can be understood. Alice’s primitive identity concept and her lack of logical reasoning, interspersed with certain perceptual disturbances, the irrationality of the primary process of thinking and symbolic representation of existentialist, and absurdist themes are explored through this paper.

How to cite this article: Baruah S, Das H. Alice in Wonderland and Psychiatry: A Deep Dive. East J Psychiatry 2024;24(2):64-66.

Source of support: Nil

Conflict of interest: None

Keywords: Depersonalization, Distortion, Fantasy, Identity, Reasoning, Symbolization.

INTRODUCTION

“Anon, to sudden silence won,

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is a jewel of English literature that delves into diverse themes of metamorphosis of a child’s thought process, the inherent magical thinking and inquisitiveness of an exploring brain, and also the indomitable urge to question societal norms and conventions that are a bedrock of fledgling juvenility. This paper attempts to explore the wide range of psychological and psychiatric themes illustrated through the young protagonist Alice, in relation to contemporary psychiatry as chronicled colorfully by Lewis Carroll throughout her fascinating roving in “Wonderland.”

Jean Piaget’s preoperational stage2:

“There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural).”

As a 7-year-old, still in Piaget’s preoperational stage, Alice had a primitive identity concept of what a rabbit essentially could or could not do. It was reflective of her being on the verge of logical reasoning when later she questioned herself on the easy acceptance of a talking rabbit wearing a waistcoat and worrying about being on time.

Alice faces her next problem, a hallway with locked doors and no way out. A small door, hard to spot, that opens outside to a beautiful garden, is symbolic of the solution she is looking for. There is one key to open the door but Alice is too big to fit through it.

Here in the dream, she starts seeing things that appear to have distorted sizes and she finds herself changing her own form to fit them.

“Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin. For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”

What seems like a ridiculous question to an adult, is a grave problem to Alice. “How to fold up like a telescope so she can fit through the door?” And like sudden insight would appear to an adult, Alice finds a potion that tells her “Drink me.” Having shrunk to an appropriate size, Alice finds another problem how to reach for the key on the now gigantic glass stool. For a 7-year-old, who was suddenly transported to a different world, while on her afternoon nap and with probable hunger pangs, the answer lies in the cake that was lying beneath the glass table.

This part of the story may be signifying insight learning. In Alice’s dream, whenever faced with a dead end, she finds herself carrying out unconscious perceptual reorganization of the environment she was already in, and the answer to the problem comes to her like an “Aha” moment. A sudden illumination that the key was already there, she only had to look in the right place.

When Alice grows larger and smaller by consuming different foods, she seems to accept this as part of Wonderland’s logic but often does not question the mechanism behind it. Her reasoning is more empirical—”If I eat or drink something, I will change size”—without understanding the deeper cause. This exhibits the transductive nature of Alice’s reasoning and her experiences in Wonderland mirror the way young children reason—by associating unrelated events and sometimes engaging in magical thinking. This style of thinking contributes to the dreamlike, surreal quality of the story, where logic is fluid and anything seems possible.

DEPERSONALIZATION

“How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night?”

Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD) is a dissociative disorder affecting approximately 1% of the general population,3 characterized by persistent or recurring episodes of detachment from oneself.4 It can be observed across several psychiatric disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, panic disorder, and depression,5,6 as well as neuropsychiatric disorders including functional neurological disorder and epilepsy.7 The “I am not me” phenomenon is a core experience of depersonalization, where you feel disconnected from your own sense of self.

Finding herself in a strange situation, she felt unsure if she really was Alice anymore.

It seemed as though she was not Alice but one of her friends. She was not Ada; her hair was still like Alice’s. But she had mixed up her geography, so she must be Mabel and not Alice.

ERIKSON’S INDUSTRY VS INFERIORITY

In the Eriksonian model of psychosocial development, Alice was yet in stage 4: industry vs inferiority where the virtue acquired is competence.8 At this stage, children are integrated into society for the first time but the idea of conforming for the purpose of inclusion does not come into question. There are no cliques, the Duck and a Dodo, the Lory and the Eaglet, and several other curious creatures together participate in a Caucus race, with no end point and no winners.

DISTORTIONS OF SIZE, SHAPE, AND TIME

In Alice’s dream, fixity is an exception. Doors can be tiny, biting off a mushroom cap can grow or shrink your head, or altogether give you the long neck of a serpent. These distortions had a relationship with Alice’s state of mind, in the sense that she derived her sense of self from it. As a tiny Alice, she becomes afraid of a playful puppy but when she’s her normal or larger self, can even answer to the Queen of Hearts. This is yet another example of transductive reasoning when superficial changes are attributed to a change in a child’s idea of herself.

In the Mad Hatter and March Hare’s tea party, we see an example of a time distortion. The Hatter claims that he was accused once of murdering Time and since then Time has not spoken to him. As a result of this, it has always been 6 O’clock and hence it is always tea time, with no space to do anything else in between. The attribution of life-like character to something abstract like Time is reflective of animism, another feature of childlike, imaginative thinking.2

EXISTENTIALISM

“Who are YOU?” said the Caterpillar. Alice replied, rather shyly, I—I hardly know, sir.

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I can’t explain MYSELF, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

Throughout this work of Lewis Caroll, Alice finds herself just as queer as her surroundings. Sometimes she is the size of a caterpillar and sometimes has the neck of a serpent. This is perhaps a direct reference to existentialist themes such as fluidity of identity which may be expressed by Alice’s inability to answer confidently, each time she is challenged.

The self is not fixed, choices, actions and experiences determine an individual’s essence. For a 7-year-old Alice, these choices have been broken down into simpler things such as eating cake and drinking of potion.

PRIMARY PROCESS OF THINKING

The Fish Footman with a letter from the Duchess and The Frog Footman with a letter from the Queen, the baby who turned out to be a pig&

Alice’s story takes absurd turns that seemingly lead nowhere. There are characters with odd attributes that come and go, that give her a little clue to get to the next part of her dream but in their entirety essentially exist outside the parameters of logical thought: an attribute of primary thought processes. Freud believed primary process thinking is prominent in early childhood, dreams, and psychotic states, where there is a breakdown in the barriers between conscious and unconscious thought.9 The story’s dream-like nature, absurd logic, and disjointed flow reflect the mind’s inner workings when not constrained by the secondary process of thinking that is, reality and logic.

Another aspect of primary thinking seen in Alice’s story is symbolization. The urgency of the Rabbit may be symbolic of an unconscious anxiety that Alice may be experiencing. The garden through the small door, is a symbolic end to a problem that just keeps eluding young Alice. Finally, crossing a sea of her own tears to a shore & an illogical end to her quest of getting out of the hallway with locked doors. The Caterpillar questions her identity and Alice herself changing sizes to match her circumstances, reflective of her primitive sense of personal identity that is on the verge of being cemented.

Alice’s desires, fears, and anxieties are expressed through symbolic content in her dream.

ABSURDISM

From the Caucus race to the Mad Hatter’s tea party and the Queen’s game of Croquet Ball with Hedgehogs and flamingos, the central plot of Alice’s dream was that there is essentially no rational meaning to anything. Initially, where Alice is bothered by loose ends and the nonsensical nature of things, but in the last few chapters, she adjusted to the idea that anything was possible and even found humor in the chaos.

Swami Vivekananda once said the following about Alice in Wonderland, “One dream follows another without connection. There is no such thing as law or connection in this world, but we are thinking that there is a great deal of connection. One idea comes and jumps into another, without any connection. When you were children, this was the most wonderful connection. This man brought back his thoughts of childhood, which were perfectly connected to him as a child, and composed this book for children. And all these books that men write, trying to make children swallow their own ideas as men, are nonsense. We too are grown-up children, that is all.”10

Although Alice in Wonderland is famous as a children’s tale, it has catered to the imagination of both children and grownups alike because it addresses the innate human need to break tradition and convention. Liberation and salvation are achieved through imagery and incongruity is the norm, not the exception. Similar parallels are seen in Indian philosophy posits that the world is an illusion, the word used is “MAYA,” but the viewpoint is not of negation or nihilism, rather it is a stunning claim that the world is not governed by the laws of physics, because had it been dictated by fixed and rigid laws, there would have been no way of “changing the world.”

REFERENCES

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8. Orenstein GA, Lewis L. Eriksons Stages of Psychosocial Development. In: StatPearls. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK556096/.

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