Trauma occurs when we are given more to experience in this life than we can experience consciously. Such experience--often occurring in early childhood--is "unbearable" or "unspeakable" and therefore cannot be metabolized. It threatens the child with what one psychoanalyst called "soul murder." Fortunately, this almost never happens and it is prevented from happening by a sophisticated system of defences that come to the rescue of the soul. Described by Dr. Kalsched as the "self-care-system," this dynamic structure of dissociative defences assures that the vital core of a person is not violated. Instead it is split off into the unconscious where it lives a kind of ghost-like existence, numb, unable to feel, but with a secret longing for rebirth. How this "lost heart of the self" is contacted again in psychotherapy and how the inner resistances to this contact are overcome, will be the subject of this weekend's program.

   In both a Friday evening lecture and Saturday workshop, we will explore these themes with the help of clinical examples, dreams, and illustrations from literature, art and contemporary film.

Friday Evening:  Images of the Lost Soul-Child in the Psychotherapy of Early Trauma

   In this slide-illustrated lecture, Dr. Kalsched will describe a series of dramatic moments in the psychotherapy of trauma survivors where a breakthrough occurred in the client's access to dissociated feelings. These moments were followed by vivid dreams in which a lost or abandoned "child" appears--often menaced by the psyche's repressive "powers." He will then show the parallels between these dreams and the those ancient myths that describe the birth and trials of the archetypal Hero.

Donald Kalsched, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Psychoanalyst in private practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a senior training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts where he teaches and supervises.

His 1996 book The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit has found a wide readership in both psychoanalytic and Jungian circles and has been translated into many languages.

Dr. Kalsched teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, pursuing his inter-disciplinary interest in early trauma and dissociation theory and its mytho-poetic manifestations in the mythic and religious iconography of many cultures.