“In the previous LSS Newsletter, I  wrote about THE WALL as a psychosomatic phenomenon. I hypothesized that building a wall represents an effort to separate the American body politic from human bodies that might penetrate into--and contaminate--this American body. The maintenance of personal boundaries may be related to immune functioning.

Maintaining personal boundaries transfers or is externalized into the political domain: Nations define themselves based on the boundaries they establish (see map below). Human beings struggle to maintain or preserve the boundaries of their own nations.

Trump's desire for THE WALL may be derived from his own boundary issues. He projects these issues, in a megalomaniacal way, into the passionate desire or struggle to maintain the boundaries of "America." An important dimension of his ideology of "making America great again" is his effort to prevent certain classes of people from penetrating through America's boundaries and into the body politic.

Of course, the desire to preserve national boundaries is not unique to Donald Trump or to Americans. It's the foundation of the ideology of nationalism, which revolves around clearly delineating one nation from another (see map below). Lines of demarcation must be drawn. Boundaries must not be violated.

Violations of the boundary may evoke paranoid anxiety, sometimes generating "war."