Undoing Severe Dissociation Through “Enactments”: A Lecture with Donald E. Kalsched

In past presentations at the Jung Society of Washington and elsewhere, I have lectured about a sophisticated inner system of archetypal defenses, which I called the “Self-care system.”  I suggested that this system forms a kind of core complex of the early-traumatized psyche.  I described how psychotherapy often becomes a battle between the forces of growth and life on the one hand vs. the anti-life forces of dissociation, shaped by the “Self-care system,” on the other.

In previous lectures, I focused on the inner structure of the system and how it shows up in dreams.  In this lecture, I will focus more on the therapeutic process of what this battle actually looks like in the psychoanalytic dialogue. The current term for such dramatic therapeutic “embroilments” is enactments, and two vivid enactments will be presented--one involving “love” and the other involving “hate,” erupting into the transference/counter-transference field.  

Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D. is a Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist with a private practice in Topsham, Maine.  He is a member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and lectures nationally and internationally on 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).  Currently he has finished the manuscript for a third book, Trauma, Dissociation, and the Unremembered Child: Stories and Reflections, to be published by Routledge in 2027.