Workshops

The C.G. Jung Foundation presents
Trauma and The Lost and Recovered Soul
a daylong workshop led by
Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D.

Saturday, May 15, 2004, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

According to C. G. Jung, the human personality has a transpersonal origin and essence. With the birth of each person, a splinter of the Godhead becomes embodied as a human soul (incarnation).

However, when trauma strikes the developing psyche of a child, a “basic fault” opens up in the psyche and the person becomes disincarnate. A part of the self retreats into “God’s world,” where it continues to live in a suspended animation as a lost soul. The lost soul secretly wants to return to the body so that the process of creative living and personality development can continue, but primitive defenses prevent this return, encapsulating the lost soul in the unconscious, leaving it imprisoned by the dark powers of the archetypal world- what Jung called “possession by a spirit.”

How the lost soul of the trauma survivor is coaxed back into life and relationship and out of the grasp of “daimonic” powers will be the focus of our weekend together. Dreams during the healing process often reveal the lost soul as a divine child in the care of “daimonic” caretakers who both resist and facilitate the soul’s return. Fairy tales often show how a spell cast by demonic forces gradually loses its power over the hero/heroine as the soul returns and is “re-incarnated.”

Ultimately, we will find that only love and human relationship can break the grip of the traumatized psyche’s “bewitchment” of the soul, leading to redemption and the “enchantment” of life lived once again, under the star of one’s own destiny.

Participants are asked to read the Grimm’s Fairy Tales “The Girl Without Hands” and “The Water of Life,” in advance of the weekend.

Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Katonah, N. Y. He is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of New York and is a senior faculty member and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, as well as with the Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. His book, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit (Routledge, 1996) is in its fourth printing.

Saturday, May 15, 2004 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
To be held at the C.G. Jung Foundation,
28 East 39th Street, New York City