We are all more or less traumatized, affirms Donald Kalsched, a Jungian analyst and trauma specialist who wrote Trauma and the Soul. Kalsched avows that reality confronts us with “things that break our hearts,” noting that there’s also a huge amount of unacknowledged terror in all of us.
Nightmares can be an effort by the psyche to help us integrate some of disowned material from our childhood. In what Kalsched has termed the “self-care system,” a system of defense which is made up of both protec