It is in his nature not to belong to any locality and not to possess any permanent abode; always he is on the road between here and yonder..."23 With these lines Otto gives us the very essence of Hermes' nature, probably the one among his many qualities that most challenges us when we are faced with conveying it into a therapeutic insight. It is here in this duplexity of being "always on the road between here and yonder" that Otto offers us another image, closer to the psychic than that of the boundary stones, for giving insight into the concept of the borderline. In the borderline (the duplexity) there is no split, for instance, into day or night, "We sense the peculiar twilight mood, and though the time is daylight, we think of the uncertainties of the night..."24 All these elements - the duplexity, being in the here and yonder, and the twilight mood - move us toward archetypal references for what psychiatry and psychotherapy have coined as a 'borderline' condition. We have an imaginative background of archetypal references for a pathological condition expressed with a concept. The psychiatric term 'borderline' condition can be seen as a pathological expression of this peculiar aspect of Hermes' borderline nature or being. We can see that condition of living life within a duplexity, half in a mental institution and half in the city,25 half neurotic with psychotic spells, either as being an expression of Hermes' pathology or as a manifestation of his true essence, something we have all experienced, being half-sick, half-healed and our lives moving along that road between sickness and healing. Otto describes another way in which Hermes makes his epiphany: But the marvelous and mysterious which is peculiar to night may also appear by day as a sudden darkening or an enigmatic smile. This mystery of night seen by day, this magic darkness in the bright sunlight, is the realm of Hermes, whom, in later ages, magic with good reason revered as its master. In popular feeling this makes itself felt in the remarkable silence that may intervene in the midst of the liveliest conversations; it was said, at such times, that Hermes had entered the room... The strange moment might signify bad luck or a friendly offer, some wonderful and happy coincidence.26 And Otto's beautiful description allows us to make another theft from a scholar and move Hermes directly into the analytical consulting room. We have all experienced those remarkable silences. They can be detected as an epiphany of Hermes, expressing itself in this uncanny way, having its own significance and value. These strange moments are the peculiar expression of Hermes. It is in these instances of his epiphany that he moves us the most, and his appearance impels us to remain silent; this is when he bestows most of his benefits, when he is the friendliest of the gods, when he connects us to our primitive instinct, when he introduces his own archetypal borderline world, or, better said, a world different from the world of the other gods. "It is in the full sense of a world, that is to say, a whole world, not a fraction of the total sum of existence, which Hermes inspirits and rules. All things belong to it, but they appear in a different light than in the realms of the other gods."
— Rafael López-Pedraza
López-Pedraza is doing something precise here that psychiatry cannot quite manage: he is returning the borderline condition to its source. When the clinical vocabulary names a person "borderline," it implies a defect of location — the self refuses to settle on one side of a line. But Hermes was never meant to settle. He is the one whose nature is the road itself, whose element is not earth or fire or sea but transit, the between. To pathologize that as incomplete arrival is to mistake the messenger for a failed resident.
What makes this more than a clever reframing is the silence. Those sudden intervals López-Pedraza borrows from Otto — the hush that falls in the middle of a lively room — are not absences of meaning but a different order of presence. Hermes entering the consulting room is not a breakdown of the therapeutic process; it is the process touching something it cannot speak directly. The analysis that waits inside that silence is doing more than the analysis that fills it.
The deeper implication is uncomfortable: the person who lives half in and half out, who cannot secure a fixed address in any single world, may not be failing to integrate. They may be hosting a genuine archetypal reality — one that does not resolve into daylight, and does not need to. Twilight is not failed noon. It is its own complete world, with its own gods, and Hermes rules it entirely.
Rafael López-Pedraza·Hermes and His Children·1977