Border

Animal life, Dodds reminds us, is not unrestricted potency but self-regulation. It has its borders both territorially and in behaviour. In Dionysus, borders join that which we usually believe to be separated by borders… Kerényi says that, wherever Dionysus appears, the 'border' also is manifested. He rules the borderlands of our psychic geography.

Hillman, following Kerényi, argues that Dionysus is the archetypal figure of the border itself — not merely a transgressor of limits but the very power that manifests them and dissolves the oppositions they ordinarily enforce.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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In connection with 'border' I thought of the border between consciousness and the unconscious on the one hand, and between Freud's views and mine on the other. The extremely rigorous customs examination at the border seemed to me an allusion to analysis.

Jung treats the border as a primary symbol for the threshold between conscious and unconscious, and for the act of analysis as a kind of customs examination that discloses hidden psychic 'contraband.'

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

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Along the mirrored border one does not hear the language of meaning, understanding each other is not the aim… There is instead a miming dance back and forth of the border guards, the greetings of images, exchange of gifts, ceremonies. Have you glimpsed toward whom I am pointing? Hermes. He is God of borders and hermeneutics.

Hillman reconceives the therapeutic border as a Hermetic space governed not by translation of meaning but by imaginal exchange, positioning Hermes as the presiding deity of all border crossings between psychic worlds.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis

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We fear them and are wonderfully impressed when they ask us to come across the border. But what border? I think it is less the simple, literal line between life and death and more the one we've drawn around love, holding

Hillman reframes the death-border invoked by dream figures as a psychological rather than literal threshold — the boundary that the ego defensively draws around love and embodied relatedness.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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walls and fences at the U.S. border and the Israeli border. All these moves attempt to achieve what Jung called the 'regressive restoration of the persona' or status quo ante, by means — in the political sphere — of literal localism.

Hillman reads political border-fortification as a collective enactment of Jungian 'regressive restoration of the persona,' a defensive literalisation of psychic closure against the Hermetic energies of globalism.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Finally I find myself on foot on a dirt track over the fields toward the Swiss border on my way back home… In the night we manage to cross the border. The Swiss border guards put us in quarantine.

Von Franz presents a dream in which the border crossing becomes a ritual of initiation and purification, the quarantine functioning as a liminal containment of newly integrated psychic contents.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting

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Looking at their own minorities across the border, many newly created states considered the drawing of the borders unsatisfactory as well, which led to numerous border conflicts that partially escalated into border wars.

Hannah situates political border conflicts within a broader analysis of collective psychological projection, where the contested demarcation of national frontiers mirrors unresolved tensions of identity and sovereignty.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting

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Neurons are connected to one another via a border area called

Damasio employs 'border' in a strictly neuroanatomical sense to designate the synaptic junction between neurons, offering no depth-psychological elaboration.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010aside

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The border between layer VI and the subplate is not sharp.

Schore uses 'border' descriptively within prefrontal cortex histology, noting that the boundary between cortical layers is a zone of gradation rather than a sharp line.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside

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