Our Divided Nature Within The psyche is split. Breaming with inner divisions, we may say that the subject – we – are comprised of multiple self-states in opposition or competition with each other vying for expression, if not domination, but willing to settle for a compromise. This is largely due to the plethora of rival unconscious desires or schemata that populate mental life,1 but it is a universal feature of thought itself. The logic of inner division produces gaps, lacunae – holes in being that expose incongruities, but it also highlights the polarizing nature of the psyche based on an economy of splitting. Hegel shows how this binary logic is at play in the schism of thinking itself, what psychoanalysis refers to as “projective identification,” namely, the negation and projection of our internal contents onto otherness, only then to come to identify with our split-off nature, and re-incorporate it back into our internal constitutions.2 This is the antediluvian pattern of the rotary motion of the dialectic as split-off or dissociated self-states and the manifold of object representations that transpire within unconscious process due to the vicissitudes of desire and drive, which further fuel counter-identifications that intensify in quality constellated as tensions of difference. Intensities of splitting underlie the essence of psyche.