Every new item about the world needs to be fitted into the picture, but unlike a puzzle piece it does so by modifying and bending the immediately surrounding structure. This felt as a resistance which may be quite out of proportion to the objective significance of the new item, considered, say, as one among a large number of similar ones. This resistance is not registered as cognitive but as affective and connative which means that it emerges as something like an ego defense. What started out as cognitive friction has now put the self at stake, but only indirectly, since whatever it is that the ego is defending is concealed, and only signals danger by way of symbolic mediations. If you try to hunt down the core of the defense you might come upon a definite scene but only in a dream-like reconstruction which could as easily be a diversion. All the intrigue of a surreal spy novel surrounds these redoubts of the self, and the entire lexicon of this genre is oddly appropriate here, transposed into the intra-psychic. All of this represents one of the ways in which the sense of self is stubbornly conserved, demanding that the inquirer go behind the scenes, and behind the behind of the scenes of the scenes. The question may arise as to whether there really are great powers locked in a death-struggle driving this whole complexification, or whether their remote kremlins are in fact uninhabited, are only mazes fabulated out of imagination fragmented and ungoverned, freely devouring itself.