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The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit

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I have read and re-read this excellent book. Kalsched makes a wonderful bridge between object relations and depth psychology, bringing to bear on the problem of trauma and its attendant archetypal defenses of the self the best of both approaches.

This whole area is of great interest in clinical circles as we see so many patients with borderline, narcissitic, or schzoid characters. The understanding Kalsched offers, cast in Jungian terms, is invaluable.

The essence of the problem is that due to trauma, and keeping in mind this is almost never a single dramatic event, but rather a series of smaller, more subtle failures over time, a split occurs in the psyche. And a defense system develops to protect that essential core from further injury.

This archetypal defense system is primitive and ruthless in its efforts to guard against further assualt on the Self. It's rather like preferring the agony of the known to the terror of the unknown. Analysis with such patients is often long and difficult and the postive transference of today can rapidly dissolve into hatred and negative transference tomorrow. It requires patience from the analyst and capacity to contain the intense affects that arise.

Kalsched artfully weaves case material, theory, and fairy-tales into a challenging, readable and valuable mix.

This book is the best clinical Jungian book I have read in a long time.

From the introduction: What dreams reveal and what recent clinical research has shown are that when trauma strikes the developing psyche of a child, a fragmentation of consciousness occurs in which the different "pieces" (Jung called them splinter-psyches or complexes) organize themselves according to certain archaic and typical (archetypal) patterns, most commonly dyads or syzygies made up of personified "beings." Typically, one part of the ego regresses to the infantile period, and another part progresses, i.e., grows up too fast and becomes precociously adapted to the outer world, often as a "false self." The progressed part of the personality then caretakes the regressed part. This dyadic structure has been independently discovered by clinicians of many different theoretical persuasions -- a fact that indirectly supports its archetypal basis.

From the back cover: In The Inner World of Trauma Donald Kalsched explores the interior world of dream and fantasy images encountered in therapy with people who have suffered unbearable life experiences. He shows how, in an ironical twist of psychical life, the very defensive images designed to protect the self from further injury can become malevolent and destructive, resulting in further trauma for the person. Why and how this happens are among the questions this book sets out to answer. Drawing on detailed clinical material, the author gives special attention to the problems of addiction and psychosomatic disorder, as well as the broad topic of dissociation and its treatment.

Donald Kalsched here brings together Jung's views on trauma and re-visions many classical interpretations of Jungian theory. By focusing on the archaic and primitive defenses of the core self and the mytho-poetic language of dream and fairy tale, he connects Jungian theory and practice with contemporary object relations theory and dissociation theory. At the same time, he shows how a Jungian understanding of the universal images of myth and folklore can illuminate treatments of the traumatized patient.

Trauma is about the rupture of those transitional processes of human relatedness that make life worth living. Donald Kalsched sees this as a spiritual problem as well as a psychological one and in The Inner World of Trauma he provides a compelling insight into how an inner self-care system tries to save the personal spirit from annihilation.

Readers well grounded in Jungian concepts are most likely to find this book, in which Kalshed writes about the development of self-care systems with great insight and compassion, of value and interest. The book is readable, well written, and well organized. Part One contains clinical illustrations and the views of Jung, Freud and others on the development of self-care systems. The book is well grounded in the larger world of psychoanalytic theory. Part Two, which focuses on aspects of the daimonic in myth and fairy tales, further illustrates the perverse nature of the self-care system which both preserves and destroys. This is a book I have returned to many times.

The Inner World of Trauma is a truly compelling, moving and important book. Kalsched shows that when a child is traumatised, or shamed for its genuine and healthy needs, an inner figure is constellated in the child's psyche and the job of that inner figure is to protect the child from being further shamed and re-traumatised. What is more the inner protector will do whatever it has to do in order to prevent a repeat of the original, unbearable experience - and if that means turning into a daimonic, destructive and self-destructive inner persecutor, then so be it.

With the aid of real stories, dreams, myths and fairy stories, Kalsched describes some of the strategies employed by protector-persecutor to prevent and possibility of re-traumatisation. Protector-persecutor may (1) split the personality so that the traumatised child dissociates from his or her experiences, (2) take the person into to depression to prevent him or her having hope of something better (and thus opening itself to dissapointment), (3)encase the person in a world of fantasy, or (4) numb the person through addiction. If none of those work the inner daimon may lead the person to suicide.

More-often-than-not the strategies of the inner protector-persecutor mean that the person is stuck in a cycle where the 'trauma' is repeated time and time again. Every time the person has a chance of escaping into life the protector-persecutor deems the risk of retrumatisation to be too high, and so sabotages the path to freedom and emotional health.

Worse, the inner figure fails to take account of changing circumstances, and it fails to recognise that the traumatised child has grown up and now has new, and healthier, ways of defending him or her self. The inner protector gets stuck at the point where the original damage occured. Kalsched explains that in order to find freedom from protector-persecutor a person has to become conscious of how this inner figure is suffocating life, and then the person has to find the courage to do battle with the protector-persecutor.

All that Kalshed writes about resonates deeply with my own experience. I am not a therapist, and I struggled with some of the more technical language, but having read The Inner World of Trama I now have a sense of of what drives much of my destructive and self-destructive behaviour. More importantly, the new understanding that I have gained from this book has helped me to drop some of the shame that I have about my destrucitve and self-destructive behaviour, and it has provoked me into starting to challenge some of the toxic beliefs and strategies employed by my inner protector-persecutor.

In other words, for me, The Inner World of Trama has been a truly thoughtful, powerful, moving and healing book. In fact, I consider myself to be pretty widely read, and The Inner World of Trauma is one of the two most important books that I have ever read. Lots of books have added bits to the puzzel of my(self) understanding but with Kalsched's book those pieces have come together and I now have an expanded understanding of my life. That is both enormously challenging and enormously exciting. Kalsched's ideas offer me the possibility of freedom and healing 'just' so long as I can find the courage to act on what I now understand about protector-persecutor. Taking on protector-persecutor is tough, and I suspect that I will be challenging protector-persecutor for the rest of my life - however, becasuse of Kalsched's deep, deep insights I can sense the possibility of real change.

In many ways, having read Kalsched's book I feel like I have entered a new world - albeit a world that isn't going to suddenly become easy, happy and neatly sorted out!!However, I am hugely grateful for this book and I do not hesitate in recommending this book without reservation.

This is one of the most important books that I have ever read. Kalsched describes how the very strategies that we develop to help us survive childhood trauma can turn against us, becoming the psychological equivalent of an auto-immune disease. The inner protector, which emerged to get us through trama, turns into an inner persecutor (and the trauma can simply be a mis-fit between a child and the child's environment, rather than anything more obvious and dramatic).

This book has revolutionised the way that I understand my world, my behaviour and the behaviour of those around me. It has enabled me to realise why I get stuck and why real change is so difficult (in contrast to all the quick-fix promises made by the self-help industry).

This is not an easy book to read. It does not offer simple answers. Reading this book in an open and self-reflective way is accutely painful, because it hits deep truths about the self-destructive side of who we all are. And yet Kalsched's observations about what happens to us as a result of trauma does create the possibility of greater freedom. Kalsched explains why it can be so hard to change, and through his explaination he unlocks the door to real change. Kalsched's ideas on the protector turned persecutor create an understanding which enables healing to occur.

This is a HUGE book. I cannot reccomend it too highly.

Since its publication in 1996, The Inner World of Trauma by Donald Kalsched still holds its place as an important contribution to the treatment of trauma. Kalsched offers the reader a valuable bridging between analytical psychology and the psychoanalytic object-relations perspective. He delineates what develops in a child's inner world when outer life becomes traumatic. When trauma shatters the outer experience, life saving defenses arise and "assure the survival of the human spirit." The reader is reminded of the value of the psyche's dissociability in the face of trauma. Kalsched explains his formulation of the inner self-care system with its capacity for "preservation of life for the person whose heart is broken by trauma." Ironically, the images created by the psyche to protect the self can turn malevolent and continue a traumatizing inner process. In traumatized patients' dreams, the inner image may appear organized in contentious dyads. The regressed part of the personality may appear as a wounded animal or vulnerable child while the progressed part of the personality-- the part that protects or persecutes-- may appear as witch, devil or some kind of enslaving monster. In my opinion Kalsched helps the clinician to offer the trauma patient a more complete treament. Kalsched continues to bring light to "that dark background of unconscious imagery making up The Inner World of Trauma."

The Inner World of Trauma by Donald Kalsched

The Inner World of Trauma is a scholarly, sensitive and comprehensive study of what happens when people experience trauma in early childhood, particularly pervasive trauma that etches patterns and coping responses in the psyche that are difficult to overcome. A Jungian analyst, Kalsched has done exhaustive research that complements his clinical experience. That and his always respectful tone make the book a balm for the soul of the trauma survivor.

Pervasive trauma creates deep contradictory orientations in the psyche, most notably an inner protector that magically tends the psyche, paired with a contradictory inner persecutor. Both function to protect the person's inner world by limiting their options to develop solid relationships in an outer worldly sense. As tragic as the inner life of the trauma survivor may be, there is often also a magical imaginary life that expresses itself through healing, artistic and mystical channels. The protector aspect leads trauma survivors into helping professions, and sometimes endows them with visionary powers. Kalsched explores the transpersonal realms accessed by trauma survivors, tracking the presenting pathology of post-traumatic stress disorder into poetic realms, where deep healing can actually occur. He analyzes fairy tales and mythological archetypes to help us see that the patterns in the traumatized psyche have universal metaphorical themes. The fairy tales and myths give us clues and real information to help heal and resolve the split in the psyche.

This book is for lay people and therapists. For trauma survivors who are willing to work deeply to heal, this book is an unparalleled jewel. To find value in our experiences, even the most difficult and distasteful, truly transforms us, amplifying the potential for resolution of otherwise intractable difficulties. I can't overstate the value of this book for anyone concerned with childhood trauma. Self-help books, new age platitudes and the Freudian approach all leave something specific out of the equation. Trauma does create pathology, but that label must be applied gingerly, respectfully, to be helpful but not used to objectify, stigmatize or condemn. The depth of the wound must be plumbed with compassion, wisdom and appreciation for the value of the spiritual lessons that come when the trauma survivor is given the tools and the support to embrace the totality of their history and their very real experiences with their whole being.

I highly recommend this book to anyone doing depth work in this area.

This book is a clearly written explanation of the way the unconscious tries to protect the traumatized child from remembering and thus reexperiencing the original trauma. Kalsched gives extremely helpful examples of nightmares which may be the Self's way of protecting the vulnerable child from further harm.

Reading can be a transformative act when the book itself is made up of connective, linking material. Just part of the impressive work of scholarship performed by the author is the shaping of complex sources and analytic encounters into an absorbing narrative on the subterranean world of suffering, unlocking a dark human survival secret suppressed for so long.

Donald Kalsched shows how contradictory forces within and beneath the self are unleashed in instances of early trauma, and how a primitive rage linked with depression in later life captures the traumatised child.

This is what he calls the miracle and the 'tragedy' of the archetypal 'self-care' system, where a secondary line of defences catch the self tragically falling before it has had the chance of life. It is as if in the transitional state of infancy somewhere between spirit and matter, an older parenting system is at work, but it is a bleak unidifferentiated force which must itself be tamed and transformed in later life. Dangerous work as this book recounts, as the inner self and the introjected caregiver battle for control over the life and death of the spirit.

This isn't just an academic work. In the presence of an unusually gifted psychotherapist, the Inner World of Trauma gives a penetrating insight into what the transformative process looks like and how it takes place.

For non-therapists the only qualification for getting the best out of this work may be some familiarity with human suffering. Donald Kalsched shows how early trauma shatters human experience, atomising it into fragments so it cannot again be easily reconnected. And it is instructive that the author has had to travel the world of archetypes, folklore, psychoanalysis and alchemy to reconstruct meaning from its scattered hiding places. It is as if we have buried the reality from ourselves twice, dismembered at the unconscious level, the vestigal shards distributed across the physical world. In Kalsched's important, patient journey of reconstruction, he captures the most puzzling and mysterious legacies of trauma and gives them new meaning. And broken humanity some hope.

Kalsched specialises in splits not just in the human sphere, but in the doctrinal realm. The chapter that deals with the Freud-Jung fall-out charts the developmental cost to psychotherapy itself. Each creed backed itself into the entrenched specialism: Freud into defences, Jung into transpersonal symbols. And it was in a moment of penetrating insight that Kalsched discovered a connecting artery, even though at that moment his interest was in a recursive theme, the violent dream of one of his clients.

As a Jungian, he recognised the destructive archetype at work - the killer in the dream, but what he also intuitively saw is that it pointed not just to something symbolic, but to an annihilating defence at work in the self at that moment in the therapy. He witnessed the point where defences destroyed the ability of the client to reintegrate. Ruptured parts attempted to regroup at the critical juncture in the process, but the event could not yet be metabolised, and the client's border-defence guards violently preserved the split.

This resistance in the form of dream carnage was itself traumatising - but it gave therapist and client a new opportunity to work through past and present events as a correlated and healing process.

Through powerful enough telescopes, the explosive energies of creation are still visible, and the phenomenon Donald Kalsched uncovers can be compared to cosmological advances of the late 20th Century. Singularities, dark matter and the Big Bang model were part of a revolution in how we understood the connections between space, time and gravity. The author's research in inner space is deserving of equal attention. Archaic trauma-remnants are discernable through the cauldron of archetypal energies, giving us a small window into our own psychological creation, one forged both in violence and compassion.

The book takes us to the frontiers of the self and beyond into an older unmediated world, itself in need of healing. And a good psychotherapist.

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "William Everson: The Shaman's Call"

Donald Kalsched has arrived at a thought provoking hypothesis on how the psyche of the child responds archetypally and affectively to overwhelming life events with "miraculous life-sustaining defenses" that are designed to ensure the survival of the human personality, or "personal spirit," from total annihilation. By "trauma" Kalsched means "any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety" (7, 1). Kalsched is the first investigator in the field of depth psychology to provide us with a comprehensive theory of the "archetypal daimonic images... that arise in response to outer trauma" (2), and with his notion of a paradoxical "self-care system" in mind, he attempts to resolve some of the most fundamental questions about how the psyche responds archetypally to the shocks of early trauma at the beginning of ego-Self development. Using the data of unconscious fantasy images, Kalsched develops a new line of interpretation of dreams, myths, and fairy tales and arrives at the connection that "trauma-linked dream imagery represents the psyche's self-portrait of its own archaic defensive operations" (2). Using the clinical material of dreams and unconscious fantasy images, he demonstrates how, "at certain critical times in the working through of trauma, dreams give us a spontaneous picture of the psyche's `second line of defenses' against the annihilation of the personal spirit" (2). In the later sections of his book, Kalsched presents a revision of the traditionally accepted Jungian formula that the Self is an organizing and integrating agency in the psyche alone, and not also a disorganizing and disintegrating agency of self-destruction. In other words, he supports the idea that the Self is a paradox for a specific reason: the Self is an organizing and integrating agency only when the psyche has not been exposed to the shocks of severe trauma, but when severe trauma is present, the psyche of the child self-destructs, and the ambivalent Self is constellated. What Kalsched has done for analytic theory and practice is to provide us with a model, which enables us to see how Jung's theory of the Self can be viewed as both a benign and malevolent being and as a whole Being that integrates and transcends the opposites. Nevertheless, how trauma turns the psyche of a child from a system of self-care into a system of self-destruction needs to be more fully illuminated with research on children's dreams. What needs to be more fully elaborated, I feel, is how the benevolent side of the self-care system compensates for the malevolent side with symbols of wholeness even in severely traumatized children. This is something Kalsched does superbly in his analysis of myths and fairy tales, but he neglects for the most part to demonstrate how healing images emerge in the presentation of his clinical data. Kalsched's book is certainly one of the classics in the field of analytical psychology. In this work he broke new ground. A very readable and engaging book.