What Must Be Protected: Self Architecture and the Topology of Psychological Threat

Conceptual paper proposing Self Architecture as the structural organization of the self that determines what kinds of reality can be integrated without defensive collapse. Seven dimensions are proposed: Self-Coherence, Self-Concept Clarity, Worth Contingency, Shame Integration Capacity, Dependency Tolerance, Self-Other Differentiation, and Ontological Self-Continuity. Three levels of regulatory stakes are formalized: affective, identity, and ontological. Self Architecture explains why specific signal classes become destabilizing and therefore require compression. Part of the SRF Theory Program, Paper 5.