Innocence and Its Violation: Signs of Severe Dissociation in Dreams, A Workshop With Donald E. Kalsc

One of the violent forms in which dissociation presents itself in dreams is as the “killing” of a vulnerable content, often a “child.” The classic mythological version of this theme is the “slaughter of the innocents” pictured in Rubens’ classic painting.  Whenever this theme emerges, we can rest assured that some vulnerable, new life-content is proving a dire threat to the “old order,” whether this is inside the psyche or out.  

Such “violence against vulnerability” is not the psyche’s effort to actually “kill” or extinguish a vulnerable content; that is, it is not the operation of some inherent evil or “death instinct.”  It is rather the defensive system’s effort to “kill” the ego’s consciousness of the threatening content.  It helps to be able to recognize this motif in dreams because it’s a sure sign that new feelings are emerging and begging to be integrated.  In this workshop, we will present multiple examples of this motif in the dreams of patients and explore ways of working with them.

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.