When the Self Rifts—and How It Repairs

Key points

Structural dissociation forms protective "task" and "pain" roles.

Repair comes through safety, physiological steadiness, and compassionate self-attachment.

Psychodynamic therapy welcomes free association and stays with silence.

In Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), a spy named Yu Tsun races to deliver a cryptic message, delivered as a murder. He visits Stephen Albert, a scholar who reveals that Yu Tsun's ancestor constructed not a physical labyrinth but a metaphorical one, a voluminous novel in which time branches endlessly—every possibility realized, forking. The story closes with peculiar clarity, and finality: life is not a single line but an array of choices, some noticed, many unseen, inevitably ending. The one we are in... what of that?

This poss