Having decided to share the experience of personal psychoanalysis, I initially wanted to lead the reader through this circle following me, focusing on my notes. However, I eventually abandoned this idea and will instead describe the components that make up the structure of the infantile personality, paying attention to the fact that everything in it is interconnected, has two opposites, and the whole structure has many degrees of protection from external influence.

We will consider the following blocks:

• Illusions: Beautiful dreams and terrible fears, what we take from the outside, transform in a certain way, and carry inside (import). Illusions form the basis of the structure of the Ouroboros.

• Full Value (ouroboric “happiness”, the embodied Reference Image) and Inferiority (ouroboric “unhappiness”): These are the two states of the infantile personality, the main character of the narrative – the actor. The actor strives to enter the first state but cannot get there, while they remain in the second state all the time.

• These states have manifestations – superiority and vulnerability – between which the actor oscillates on the outer circuit. The culmination of this oscillation cycle is the affect of superiority or vulnerability. This is what is translated from the inside to the outside.

Thus, illusions are imported, and the perception of reality altered by them is exported in the form of affects.

We will also consider the tools the ouroboric psyche uses to keep its structure intact:

• Aggression: External/internal (auto-).

• Devaluation of the true and idealization of the false.

Let's talk about the trigger mechanism of affect – comparison.

I would like to emphasize that the division into chapters is conditional, as this is a holistic, monolithic structure where each link is inseparably connected with others. This is clearly demonstrated in the scheme I developed while studying the phenomenon of Ouroboros.

Contrary to the traditional view that auto-aggression involves self-inflicted external injuries to the point of suicide, I think this is certainly true but extreme and not so frequent. Meanwhile, auto-aggressive attacks on oneself without obvious external signs occur almost constantly and are not identified by the personality as auto-aggression, and therefore cannot be brought into the zone of awareness and stopped.

Let’s take a step away from the prefix “auto-” and first figure out what aggression actually is. Defining this concept is hardly difficult – everyone knows it’s when fists come into play as a form of argument. It’s obviously unpleasant, even frightening, to find oneself on the receiving end of that kind of aggression.

There’s also passive aggression, something we’re equally familiar with: when, at the slightest misstep on our part, someone unleashes a flood of sarcastic reproaches in a specific tone. We call such people “toxic” and try to minimize contact with them, because we’re left feeling deeply uncomfortable – hurt, even – after such encounters.

Now, let’s bring back the prefix “auto-,” and we get the same thing, only directed inward, at ourselves. While physically hitting oneself is fairly straightforward to recognize as auto-aggression, passive auto-aggression – the kind where we speak to ourselves in a toxic manner after a failure – is rarely acknowledged as such. Even though we exhaust ourselves emotionally, we tend to interpret it as a bout of bad mood, sadness, anxiety – which we attribute to failures, conflicts, insomnia, or simply “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.”