HEALING TRAUMA: THE LOST AND RECOVERED SOUL-CHILD IN DEPTH PSYCHOTHERAPY: The Jung Memorial Workshop by Don Kalsched

Workshop

According to C.G. Jung, the human personality contains a vital spark or sacred core of aliveness (soul) that must personalize and embody in the course of a person’s development if optimal psychological health and ensouled living is to become possible.  But when trauma strikes the developing psyche of a child, a dissociation or split occurs in which the vital core of the self (often represented as a ‘child’) retreats into the unconscious where it continues to live in “suspended animation” under a spell cast by the powers of the psyche’s survival system.  Depth Psychotherapy offers the opportunity for renewed contact with this orphaned child and hence for renewed feeling-life, creativity, and relatedness—but not without fierce resistance thrown up by the psyche’s defensive powers.

In this slide-illustrated lecture and workshop, we will explore this archetypal struggle with the help of clinical examples, dreams, and mythological amplifications.  New findings in attachment theory, affective neuroscience and somatically attuned ways of working in the psychotherapy process, will be discussed.

Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist with a private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He is a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe, a senior faculty member and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and lectures nationally and internationally pursuing his inter-disciplinary interest in early trauma and dissociation.  He is the author of numerous articles and two major books, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit, (Routledge, 1996) and his recent Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption (Routledge, 2013).  His latest book explores how psychotherapeutic work with trauma survivors sometimes provides unexpected access to an ineffable world of soul and spirit.

Directions to the Butler Boardroom at the American University here.