The Inner World of Trauma

Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit

Donald Kalsched

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317725442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Donald Kalsched explores the interior world of dream and fantasy images encountered in therapy with people who have suffered unbearable life experiences. He shows how, in an ironical twist of psychical life, the very images which are generated to defend the self can become malevolent and destructive, resulting in further trauma for the person. Why and how this happens are the questions the book sets out to answer.
Drawing on detailed clinical material, the author gives special attention to the problems of addiction and psychosomatic disorder, as well as the broad topic of dissociation and its treatment. By focusing on the archaic and primitive defenses of the self he connects Jungian theory and practice with contemporary object relations theory and dissociation theory. At the same time, he shows how a Jungian understanding of the universal images of myth and folklore can illuminate treatment of the traumatised patient.
Trauma is about the rupture of those developmental transitions that make life worth living. Donald Kalsched sees this as a spiritual problem as well as a psychological one and in The Inner World of Trauma he provides a compelling insight into how an inner self-care system tries to save the personal spirit.

Part I

1 The Inner World of Trauma in its Diabolical Form

DOI: 10.4324/9781315788081-1

When innocence has been deprived of its entitlement, it becomes a diabolical spirit.

(Grotstein, 1984:211)

In this and the following chapter, I will offer a series of clinical vignetttes and theoretical commentary in order to explore the phenomenology of a “daimonic” figure whose appearance I have encountered repeatedly in the unconscious material of patients with a history of early childhood trauma. The word “daimonic” comes from daiomai, which means to divide, and originally referred to moments of divided consciousness such as occur in slips of the tongue, failures in attention, or other breakthroughs from another realm of existence which we would call “the unconscious” (see von Franz, 1980a). Indeed, dividing up the inner world seems to be the intention of our figure. Jung's word for this was “dissociation,” and our daimon appears to personify the psyche's dissociative defenses in those cases where early trauma has made psychic integration impossible.

I can best approach this topic by sharing with the reader how I became interested in it. Over the last twenty-five years of clinical work I have had a number of individuals in analysis who, after an initial period of growth and improvement, reached a kind of plateau where they seemed to stagnate in therapy and, instead of getting better as a result of the treatment, seemed instead to get stuck in a “repetition compulsion” of earlier behavior, which left them feeling defeated and hopeless. These were individuals who might be described as “schizoid” in the sense that they had suffered traumatic experiences in childhood which had overwhelmed their often unusual sensitivities and driven them inward. Often, the interior worlds into which they retreated were childlike worlds, rich in fantasy but with a very wistful, melancholy cast. In this museum-like “sanctuary of innocence” these patients clung to a remnant of their childhood experience which had been magical and sustaining at one time, but which did not grow along with the rest of them. Although they had come to therapy out of need, they did not really want to grow or change in ways that would truly satisfy that need. To be more precise, one part of them wanted to change and a stronger part resisted this change. They were divided within themselves.

In most cases these patients were extremely bright, sensitive individuals who had suffered, on account of this very sensitivity, some acute or cumulative emotional trauma in early life. All of them had become prematurely self-sufficient in their childhoods, cutting off genuine relations with their parents during their developing years and caretaking themselves in a cocoon of fantasy instead. They tended to see themselves as the victims of others' aggression and could not mobilize effective self-assertion when it was needed to defend themselves or to individuate. Their outward facade of toughness and self-sufficiency often concealed a secret dependency they were ashamed of, so in psychotherapy they found it very difficult to relinquish their own self-care protection and allow themselves to depend on a real person.

What gradually became clear to me through the analysis of these patients' dreams, was that they were in the grip of an internal figure who jealously cut them off from the outer world, while at the same time attacking them with merciless self-criticism and abuse. Moreover, this inner figure was such a powerful “force” that the term daimonic seemed an apt characterization. Sometimes in the dreams of my patients, this inner daimonic figure violently dissociated the inner world by actively attacking the dream-ego or some “innocent” part of the self with which the dream-ego was identified. At other times its goal seemed to be the encapsulation of some fragile, vulnerable part of the patient which it ruthlessly “divided off” from reality, as if to prevent it from ever being violated again. At still other times, the daimonic being was a kind of guardian angel, soothing and protecting a childlike part of the self inwardly while at the same time hiding it shamefully from the world. It could play a protective or a persecutory role-sometimes alternating back and forth between them. And to further complicate matters, this duplex image usually made its appearance in what James Hillman has called a “tandem” (Hillman, 1983). It usually did not appear alone, but was paired with an inner child or with some other more helpless or vulnerable “partner.” In turn, this innocent “child” had a duplex aspect — sometimes it was “bad” and “deserved” persecution, so to speak; at other times it was “good” and received protection.

In summary, these duplex imagos, yoked together as an internal “structure,” make up what I call the archetypal self-care system. As I hope to demonstrate in the ensuing pages, we have reason to believe this structure is a universal inner “system” in the psyche, whose role seems to be the defense and preservation of an inviolable personal spirit at the core of an individual's true self.

The question I began to ask myself, then, was: “How did the internal guardian figures of this ‘system’ and their vulnerable child ‘clients’ get organized in the unconscious, and from whence did they derive their awesome power over the patient's well-intentioned ego?”

Jung and Dissociation

The psyche's normal reaction to a traumatic experience is to withdraw from the scene of the injury. If withdrawal is not possible, then a part of the self must be withdrawn, and for this to happen the otherwise integrated ego must split into fragments or dissociate. Dissociation is a normal part of the psyche's defenses against trauma's potentially damaging impact — as Jung demonstrated many years ago with his word association test (Jung, 1904). Dissociation is a trick the psyche plays on itself. It allows life to go on by dividing up the unbearable experience and distributing it to different compartments of the mind and body, especially the “unconscious” aspects of the mind and body. This means that the normally unified elements of consciousness (i.e., cognitive awareness, affect, sensation, imagery) are not allowed to integrate. Experience itself becomes discontinuous. Mental imagery may be split from affect, or both affect and image may be dissociated from conscious knowledge. Flashbacks of sensation seemingly disconnected from a behavioral context occur. The memory of one's life has holes in it — a full narrative history cannot be told by the person whose life has been interrupted by trauma.

For the person who has experienced unbearable pain, the psychological defense of dissociation allows external life to go on but at a great internal cost. The outer trauma ends and its effects may be largely “forgotten,” but the psychological sequelae of the trauma continue to haunt the inner world, and they do this, Jung discovered, in the form of certain images which cluster around a strong affect -what Jung called the “feeling-toned complexes.” These complexes tend to behave autonomously as frightening inner “beings,” and are represented in dreams as attacking “enemies,” vicious animals, etc. In his only essay explicitly about trauma, Jung wrote:

a traumatic complex brings about dissociation of the psyche. The complex is not under the control of the will and for this reason it possesses the quality of psychic autonomy. Its autonomy consists in its power to manifest itself independently of the will and even in direct opposition to conscious tendencies: it forces itself tyrannically upon the conscious mind. The explosion of affect is a complete invasion of the individual, it pounces upon him like an enemy or a wild animal. I have frequently observed that the typical traumatic affect is represented in dreams as a wild and dangerous animal — a striking illustration of its autonomous nature when split off from consciousness.

(Jung, 1928a: paras 266–7)

The nature and functioning of those dissociative mechanisms responsible for complex-formation were not clear to Jung in his early experiments, but subsequent research with patients suffering from the so-called “dissociative disorders” showed that it is not a passive, benign process whereby different parts of the mind become disconnected and “drift apart.” Instead, dissociation appears to involve a good deal of aggression — apparently it involves an active attack by one part of the psyche on other parts. It is as though the normally integrative tendencies in the psyche must be interrupted by force. Splitting is a violent affair — like the splitting of an atom. This is a fact that strangely eluded Jung. Despite his awareness that traumatic affect may appear in dreams as a “wild animal,” he did not include violent affect in his understanding of the psyche's primitive defenses themselves. Contemporary psychoanalysis recognizes that where the inner world is filled with violent aggression, primitive defenses are present also. More specifically, we now know that the energy for dissociation comes from this aggression.

In the dream material of the cases below, the violent nature of these self-attacking dissociative processes is illustrated. In psychotherapy with trauma victims, it seems that as the unbearable (traumatic) childhood experience, or something resembling it in the transference, begins to emerge into consciousness, an intra-psychic figure or “force,” witnessed in the patient's dreams, violently intervenes and dissociates the psyche. This figure's diabolical “purpose” seems to be to prevent the dream-ego from experiencing the “unthinkable” affect associated with the trauma. For example, in the cases below “he” cuts off the dreamer's head with an axe, shoots a helpless woman in the face with a shotgun, feeds crushed glass to a helpless animal, and “tricks” the helpless ego into captivity in a diabolical “hospital.” These actions appear to fragment the patient's affective experience in such a way as to disperse the awareness of pain that has emerged or is about to emerge. In effect, the diabolical figure traumatizes the inner object world in order to prevent re-traumatization in the outer one. If this impression is correct, it means that a traumatogenic imago haunts these patient's psyches, supervising dissociative activities, reminding one of Jung's early suspicion that “fantasies can be just as traumatic in their effects as real traumata” (Jung, 1912a: para. 217). In other words, the full pathological effect of trauma requires an outer event and a psychological factor. Outer trauma alone doesn't split the psyche. An inner psychological agency — occasioned by the trauma — does the splitting.

Clinical Example: The Axeman

I will not soon forget the first case where these possibilities began to dawn on me. The patient was a young female artist who, later treatment revealed, had suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse by her alcoholic father, who was her only living parent and someone who, as a little girl, she had loved deeply. When this woman came to her first therapy appointment she arrived on a motorcycle, dressed in black leather, and spent the entire hour in cynical condemnation of her roommate who had recently gotten married and had a child. She was tough, contemptuous toward others, cynical about life in general, and extremely armored against any acknowledgement of her own pain. As close as she could get to acknowledging any difficulties of her own was to mention a whole bundle of psychosomatic complaints — chronic back pain, incapacitating pre-menstrual cramps, episodic asthma, and recurrent epileptic-like symptoms where she would “go blank” for several minutes. This had frightened her enough for her to seek help. Her inner life was haunted by morbid feelings of being a living dead-person and was full of overwhelming rage, portrayed in horrifying images of mutilation and dismemberment. These images of amputees, of chopped-off hands, arms, and heads, kept spontaneously appearing in her artwork, and everyone but the patient was appalled by them.

The following dream occurred about one year into her treatment immediately after a session in which, for the first time, this very self-sufficient patient had allowed herself to feel small and vulnerable in response to my departure for a summer vacation. In an unguarded moment and with the coquettish smile of an adolescent girl, she had grudgingly acknowledged she would miss me and her therapy hour. That night, after writing a long letter to me about how she could not continue her treatment (!) because she was becoming “too dependent,” she had this dream.

I am in my room, in bed. I suddenly realize I have forgotten to lock the doors to my apartment. I hear someone come into the building downstairs, walk to my apartment door — then walk in. I hear the footsteps approach the door of my room … then open it. A very tall man with a white ghost-like face and black holes for eyes walks in with an axe. He raises it over my neck and brings it down!… I wake up in terror.

Interpretation and theoretical commentary

Here we have an image of a violent decapitation — an intended split between mind and body. The neck, as an integrating and connecting link between the two, is about to be severed. The room in which the dream took place was her current bedroom in an apartment she shared with a roommate. Usually afraid of the dark, she always double-locked the door to this room before retiring. The unlocked outer door was the door to her apartment, and this door she also compulsively checked whenever she was home alone. In the dream, the ghost-like man apparently has access to both doors, just as her father had had unrestricted access to the bedroom where she slept and also to her body. Often my patient — when only 8 years old -had heard his footsteps approach her room before his regular sexual violations of her.

Clearly her “unguarded” moment of neediness within the transference during the previous hour was equivalent to her “forgetting” to lock the door in her dream and constituted a breach in her usual ego-defenses. Through this breach comes a kind of “death spirit,” an image of unmitigated horror — the ghost-like man with black holes for his eyes. The patient recognized this dream as one version of a repetitive nightmare from her childhood in which she would be attacked by threatening figures. But whv, I wondered, had she dreamed about such a horrific image the very night she felt emotionally open and vulnerable in relation to me and her therapy?

In keeping with our prior hypotheses about the function of the self-care system, the explanation seems clear enough. Apparently, the vulnerable admission of feelings of dependency in the previous hour was experienced by some part of the patient's psyche (the ghost-like man) as a dire threat — the threat of re-experiencing the unbearable pain of needing an outer object (her father) and having this need traumatically rejected. In other words, the patient's emergent feeling for me in the transference was linked associatively with her childhood devastation — the unbearable suffering she had experienced in desperately loving a man who then beat her and sexually abused her. As this “love” and neediness came into consciousness, associated with unthinkable despair from her unremembered childhood, it triggered overwhelming anxiety, which in turn triggered her dissociative defenses. And so she was going to “split” this off and leave her therapy! This splitting behavior was further represented in her dream as the axe with which the murderous figure prepared to sever the connections (links) between her body (where many of her traumatic memories were stored) and her mind. This figure, then, represents the patient's resistance to re-experiencing feelings of dependency and probably to vulnerable feelings in general. He represents a “second line” of defense, when the usual ego-defenses have been penetrated and unacceptable levels of anxiety have been constellated. As a truly daimonic figure, he would cut her off from her embodied, feeling self — in the world — in order to keep her in her persecutory “mind,” where he would have total control over her unrealized personal spirit. Such is the perverse “goal” of the self-care system when early trauma has simply broken the heart too many times.

The self-care system and the psyche's auto-immune reaction

In the intervening years since my experience with this patient, I have come to see it as almost axiomatic that in the inner world of the trauma victim we will find such diabolized personifications of self-attack and abuse. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index