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 protective and persecutory inner objects, individuals who have been abused or neglected may be tyrannized by archetypal figures in their dreams.
The work of C.G. Jung adds so much to our understanding in this arena, Kalsched asserts, because Jung believed there is a spiritual dimension to life, that we all have a religious instinct that senses and hungers for that connection to spirit….
Read the detailed summary article or listen to the full audio interview with Donald Kalsched here
Dr. Kalsched is presenting at the upcoming "Response at the Radical Edge" conference at Pacifica in June, 2017, and will be teaching a certificate program for clinicians starting in November.
