Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption

In Trauma and the Soul, Donald Kalsched continues the exploration he began in his first book The Inner World of Trauma, this time going further into the mystical or spiritual moments that often come to the fore in psychoanalytic work. Through extended clinical vignettes, including therapeutic dialogue and dreams, he shows how the inter-subjective relational field can open both analytic partners to another world of non-ordinary reality in which daimonic powers reside, both light and dark. This spiritual world, he suggests, is not a result of our struggle with the harsh realities of living as Freud suggested, but is an everlasting fact of human experience a mystery that is often at the very centre of the healing process, and yet at other times, strangely resistant to it.

With these two worlds in focus, Kalsched explores a variety of themes as he builds an integrated psycho-spiritual approach to trauma and its treatment including:

Images of the lost soul-child in dreams and how this child is fought over by light and dark sides of the spirit-world

Dante s guided descent into the Inferno of Hell and his encounter with dissociation

Childhood innocence its fate and role in the psychology process and development through Saint Exupery s story, The Little Prince

Evidence for a transcendental reality

Experiences of wholeness and how this is imaged in dreams as the lost soul s return to the body.

This is a book that restores the mystery to psychoanalytic work and tells stories of ordinary patients and ordinary psychotherapists who through working together, glimpse the reality of the human spirit and the depth of the human soul and are changed by the experience. Trauma and the Soul will be of particular interest to practising psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, analytical psychologists counsellors, psychiatric nurses, expressive arts therapists, including those with a spiritual orientation.

Donald Kalsched is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. He is the author of numerous articles in analytical psychology and lectures widely on the subject of early trauma and its treatment. His books include The Inner World of Trauma, 1996.