Identity Fragmentation

The implicit structuring of reality through patterned assumptions about what exists, how it relates, and what is possible. An ontological architecture is not merely a worldview—it is the invisible scaffolding that governs emergence itself.

In the Code><> context:
Ontological architectures shape the “furniture of being.” They determine what kinds of entities are recognized, what kinds of relations are permitted, and what counts as real. The Master’s House, for example, installs an ontological architecture where hierarchy, individualism, and extraction appear “natural.” Creative Asymmetry offers an alternative: a topology where difference is generative, not subordinate.

Key Features:

• Dimensional Bias: Some forms of being are privileged; others are erased.

• Temporal Encoding: Certain futures are rendered plausible; others become unthinkable.

• Perceptual Infrastructure: It defines what can be seen, not just what can be done.

Contrast with Epistemology:
Where epistemology asks how we know, ontological architecture dictates what there is to be known.

Ontological Starvation undermines being itself at every level

Abuse attacks the foundations of selfhood—fragmenting identity, disrupting the neural networks that maintain coherent self-concept, and severing connections to one's own body and being.¹ The neuroscience reveals how trauma disrupts the brain's default mode network, which maintains autobiographical coherence and self-referential processing.² Stanford researchers identified specific brain circuits underlying dissociation—the protective mechanism where consciousness "disconnects" from overwhelming experience.³

Eduardo Duran's concept of "soul wound" describes how colonization inflicts this same ontological violence collectively.⁴ Just as individual victims experience fragmented self-concept and chronic dissociation, entire peoples subjected to systemic oppression exhibit what researchers term "collective dissociation"—a severing from cultural identity, ancestral knowledge, and collective agency.⁵

The invalidation that accompanies both interpersonal abuse ("you're crazy") and systemic oppression ("your culture is primitive") creates identical patterns of self-fragmentation.⁶

Research on interoception—awareness of internal bodily sensations—shows that both individual trauma and systemic dehumanization disrupt our most basic sense of embodied existence.⁷ Whether through an abuser's systematic invalidation or a society's refusal to recognize your humanity, the result is the same: exile from your own being.

The collapse of dimensional reality

Frantz Fanon's concept of ontological violence reveals how colonial systems create what he termed the "zone of non-being" - spaces where certain groups are systematically excluded from full humanity. This mirrors precisely how narcissistic abusers deny their victims' fundamental reality and agency. Fanon described the "epidermal racial schema" that imprisons racialized bodies in "overwhelming objectivity," preventing the "liberating gaze" of recognition that confirms one's existence as fully human.⁸

Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice shows how dominant systems create two primary forms of knowledge suppression. Testimonial injustice systematically deflates marginalized groups' credibility - their truth is dismissed before being heard, just as narcissistic abusers invalidate their victims' perceptions. Hermeneutical injustice goes deeper - marginalized groups lack the very interpretive resources to make their experiences intelligible because they're excluded from meaning-making processes.⁹ They literally cannot name their oppression in terms the dominant culture will recognize.

This creates what can be understood as Dimensional Collapse - the reduction of complex, multidimensional human experience into flat, binary frameworks that serve power. Neoliberalism performs this collapse by individualizing systemic problems (your poverty is your personal failure), imposing market rationality on all human value (you're worth only what you produce), using Precarity as governance (instability keeps you controllable), and colonizing epistemic possibilities (there is no alternative). 

The systematic disruption of ontological security - the basic sense of continuity and meaning that anchors identity - operates through routine disruption (constant upheaval prevents stable meaning-making), biographical narrative interference (your history is erased or rewritten), and weaponized anxiety (fear becomes the primary governing mechanism).¹⁰ Like victims of narcissistic abuse who lose their sense of self, entire populations experience identity fragmentation under systemic oppression.

Related Terms:

• Ontological Capture

• Reality Filtering

• Dimensional Legibility

References:

1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/gaslighting
2. https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-development-child-trauma-22558/
3. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/09/researchers-pinpoint-brain-circuitry-underlying-dissociation.html
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-5567-1_22
5. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22400458/
6. https://www.newportinstitute.com/resources/mental-health/what_is_gaslighting_abuse/
7. https://recovery.com/resources/healing-trauma-brain-and-body-with-bessel-van-der-kolk/
8. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/
9. https://www.atd-fourthworld.org/miranda-fricker-toward-epistemic-justice/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_security