Jorge Luis Borges : The other, everyone, no one

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Image, reality, and fiction are at the heart of Jorge Luis Borges’s work. This has been emphasized many times. He has taught us, through his writing, that every being is the reflection of another, that every being is the dream of another.The great Argentine writer dreams his work, dreams the world, and perhaps ends up dreaming himself. He who, in the opinion of a great psychoanalyst, succeeded in inventing the genre of the false biographical note, in making the boundaries between real life and the life of fiction porous, or in revealing how fragile certain limits always remain.But what could such words mean in the Borgesian language: real, fiction, true, false, awake, dream? Are such distinctions as clear-cut as we like to tell and repeat to ourselves? Who, in the end, is Jorge Luis Borges?One of his writings is about God and the great Shakespeare. Managing to be everyone. To be nothing. To be a person. To be no one.Jorge Luis Borges is said to have spent his teenage years in Geneva. We propose to take a walk there, to revisit “The Circular Ruins,” “The Secret Miracle,” “The Other,” “Borges and I,” “Everything and Nothing”In search of what we can learn about identity, about the importance of crossings and often shifting borders, about the great value—both for us clinicians of adolescents and for all of us as human beings—of never locking up, never concluding, never closing.