The Inner World of Trauma

Donald Kalsched opens the chapter with a clinical observation: the phenomenology of a «daimonic» figure that he repeatedly meets in the dreams of patients with a history of early childhood trauma. The new idea is this: in twenty-five years of clinical work, a series of patients reached a plateau in therapy after an initial period of growth and healing; they were «schizoid» patients who had experienced trauma in childhood, sensitive and intelligent, living in a cocoon of fantasy and having cut off real contact with their parents. In their dreams an inner figure both protected them from the outer world and attacked them with merciless self-criticism. Kalsched calls this the «archetypal self-care system».

The theoretical explanation begins with Jung's idea of dissociation: the psyche's normal reaction to trauma is to withdraw from it, and if that is impossible part of the self must withdraw. Jung's «feeling-toned complexes» are images clustered around a traumatic experience and appear in dreams as «enemies» or wild animals. Kalsched adds: dissociation is not a passive separation but an active attack by one part of the psyche on another; this had escaped Jung. External trauma alone does not split the soul; the split is carried out by the inner psychological factor that trauma has created.

The clinical example, «The Axeman»: a young woman artist who had been repeatedly physically and sexually abused by her father allows herself, after a year of therapy, on the eve of the summer holiday and in reaction to «abandonment», to feel small and defenceless; that night she dreams: she has forgotten to lock the door, a very tall man with black holes where his eyes should be brings an axe down on her neck. Kalsched interprets the dream thus: this is a beheading, a deliberate split between mind and body; the man is the «second line of defence» against the patient's feelings of dependency and need. The author uses for such figures the concept «diabolic» (dia-ballein: to throw apart), whose opposite is «symbolic» (sym-ballein: to bring together).

At the end of the chapter Kalsched gives his hypothesis on the developmental origin of the «dark Self»: in the infant's inner world there are «good» and «bad» images and the mother serves as an «external organ» that metabolises them; in the traumatised child the negative side of the Self is not personalised but remains archaic and aggressive energy is turned inward. Then a second case — Mrs Y., depressed and divorced, in her early sixties — is described: her narcissistic mother and sick father, watching a home movie filmed 55 years earlier, the analyst's eyes filling with tears; that night again a sinister male figure enters her dream.

• The chapter opens with a clinical vignette and the theoretical commentary follows it
• The dream material is interpreted with concrete descriptions and then with Jungian and psychoanalytic terms
• The author builds his hypothesis (the self-care system) step by step and sets it out in the form of questions
• Etymological explanations (daimon, diabolic, symbolic) in the text illuminate the theoretical thought