Reading Donald Kalsched’s book “Trauma and the Soul,” for some reason I immediately remembered one of the characters from “Potteriana,” the Dark Lord. “So you think he succeeded, sir? - asked Harry. - That he created a horcrux? Why didn’t he die when he attacked me? Because he has a Horcrux, a piece of his soul, safely hidden somewhere? “A piece, and maybe more than one,” answered Dumbledore. You heard Voldemort: he was especially interested in Horace’s opinion about what happens to a wizard who creates more than one Horcrux, to a wizard who so badly wants to avoid death , that he is ready to kill many times, tear and tear his soul, just to preserve it in many horcruxes hidden separately. He could not have gleaned this information from any books. As far as I know—as far as I'm sure Voldemort knows—no wizard has ever torn his soul into more than two pieces." (from chapter 23 of J.K. Rowling's book "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince") I wonder if JK Rowling realizes that she managed to create a very accurate illustration of one of the psychological defense mechanisms? So, what is trauma, the soul, and what role do dissociative processes play? Kalshed understands trauma as an excessive amount of impressions that is beyond the human capacity for conscious experience. And this problem becomes especially acute in early childhood, when the insufficiently strong psyche is not yet prepared to process everyday experience. A child who has been the victim of violence at the hands of an authority figure, such as a parent or, say, a church figure, is so overwhelmed by the most powerful affects that he is unlikely to be able to process them, understand them, or even think about them. Such a blow to the unity of the individual is a direct threat of its destruction to the very foundation. A deep shock in childhood can become a catastrophe, “the murder of the soul.” However, such shocks almost never achieve their murderous power: the final death of the soul is avoided precisely thanks to its internal split, dissociation. Kalshed writes that the core of the Self (soul) avoids complete destruction due to the action of dissociative defenses. Only schism keeps the Self from falling into the abyss of non-existence. And the price for such salvation is the multiplicity of the Self and the need to resort to archetypal history to preserve connections between fragments of the soul (dissociated parts of the Self). The unbearable affect is distributed among dissociated parts, which are almost never aware of each other's existence. And this mechanism of fragmentation of affect saves the individual from unbearable mental pain. Kalshed believes that this is necessary for survival, since this is how part of the child’s innocence, his liveliness is “preserved” in order to ensure the possibility of its growth in the future. This preserved part is placed in a hidden narrative that comes out in dream images. Thus, the dissociative defenses by which the self avoids complete destruction lead to its loss. Dissociation preserves the seed, which cannot develop in the usual way: take root, sprout, bud, leave, flower and fruit. As a result of trauma, we can see the emergence of a "regressed self" that retreats into the unconscious, and a "progressive self" that covers up and protects what has regressed. This is how Sandor Ferenczi described the result of the split (Ferenszi, 1933). In Winnicott's terminology, the concepts of true and false (caring) self appear, which is assigned the role of protector and rationality (reason). Fairbairn and Guntrip had similar ideas about the structure of the psyche of a traumatized person. By analyzing the various products of the unconscious: fantasies, dreams, products of artistic creativity, we get closer and closer to the true self, to the soul, to the core, to the concentration of sensuality, purity and spontaneity; we travel in search of dissociated parts of myself. Tom Riddle's Trauma Tom Riddle's personal story is quite sad, and it begins with the fact that?..