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 defenses that come to the rescue of the soul. Described by Dr. Kalsched as the "self-care-system," this dynamic structure of dissociative defenses 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.

Saturday Workshop:  The Soul in Hell and its Liberation: Reflections on Clinical Depression in Light of Dante's Divine Comedy.

   Trauma survivors often report that their lives are a "living Hell." This pathological situation is created by the psyche's archetypal defenses and their depressive power over what one psychoanalyst called "the lost heart of the self," with its desire for love and intimate relationship. Psychotherapy of this condition involves what the medieval theologians called a "Descendit ad Inferos"--a harrowing descent into all the hellish un-remembered pain of the patient's early life. Dante's Divine Comedy gives us a beautiful literary example of such a companioned descent, as Virgil and Dante descend into the nether regions in order to heal the poet's mid-life depression. Following Dante and his guide down to their confrontation with the "dark Lord" of Hades, Dr. Kalsched will show how depth psychotherapy in conjunction with affective neuro-science, and the findings of attachment theory and relational theory all lead toward answers of the central question posed by both the clinical and literary material, vis.  how can the otherwise sealed crypt of Hell be opened and its occupants liberated?

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.