As I read Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma
and the Soul there were times I felt a deep resonance with my own recently published memoir. Kalsched’s
analysis of dissociation with its need to save the split-off soul-child, his
decisive stand around the spiritual core of what psychology names the
unconscious, and his call which echoes that of C.G. Jung’s for a third world
between the worlds of matter and spirit, a transcendent space, are masterfully
delivered in this book.
From a theoretical perspective
this author has left no stone unturned. His bibliography speaks volumes.
Expounding upon the salient developments in psychoanalytic psychotherapy,
Kalsched’s analysis includes the thinking of William James, Freud, Jung, Klein,
Winnicott, Kohut, Grotstein, and Schore; a list that does not begin to do
justice to his interpretations of innumerable contributors to this
ever-changing theoretical landscape.
A man of intelligence,
compassion, and depth, Kalsched writes, “the soul needs a story, a resonant
image that is adequate to its own biography.” In his book he tells stories, he
tells his patients’ stories (and for the most part they are women), the story
of The Little Prince and of Dante’s journey into the Inferno.
Though I highly recommend this
book, particularly for those in the field of depth psychology, but also for
victims of trauma in search of recovery, I would add that to my
mind Trauma and the Soul offers “a psycho-spiritual approach to human
development and its interruption” that reflects the profoundly rational
masculine influence of Western thought on psychology.
The cover leaves us with an image. “Blake’s
good and evil angels struggling for the possession of a child.” The evil angel
is black. The good angel and child are white. All are male.
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