Special Public Programs with Donald Kalsched, Ph.D: September 10th -11th, 2021
Trauma and the Lost and Recovered Soul in Psychotherapy
When relational trauma strikes the developing psyche of a child, a split sometimes occurs in which an “innocent” part of the self retreats into the unconscious where it continues to live in suspended animation as a lost soul, frequently represented in dreams as a lost or orphaned ‘child.’ Deprived of this lost spark, the outer personality struggles to survive in a “de-animated” world, often becomes depressed, and sometimes seeks psychotherapeutic help. Depth Psychotherapy offers the opportunity for renewed contact with the lost soul and hence for renewed feeling-life, creativity, and relatedness—but not without fierce resistance thrown up by the psyche’s defensive powers.
How the psychotherapy process invites the lost soul back into relationship, will be the focus of this slide-illustrated lecture and discussion. Through a series of clinical vignettes and transference/countertransference “moments,” (each followed by an important dream) Dr. Kalsched will show how the splitting and dissociation occasioned by early trauma, are gradually healed in the slow relational process of depth psychotherapy.
Friday, September 10, 2021; 7 pm – 9 pm (EST) via Zoom
Cost: $30 2 MHC and Social Work CEUs offered
Saturday Workshop:
Opening the Closed Heart: Affect Focused Clinical Work with the Victims of Early Trauma
It is well known that severe trauma leads to powerful dissociative defenses, which help the child to survive, but also injure the capacity to feel. In this seminar we will explore ways to restore this feeling-capacity through body-centered attention to affect-in-the-moment in the psychoanalytic situation. Using the speaker’s personal experience while in analysis as well as a case of severe early trauma, Dr. Kalsched will demonstrate the consciousness-killing effect of primitive defenses and show how body-sensitive techniques hold the promise of restoring the patient’s sense of aliveness and hence, opening the unconscious to those affect-images that are the building blocks of the human imagination. New findings in attachment theory, affective neuro-science and somatically attuned ways of working in the psychotherapy process, will also be discussed. Participants are encouraged to bring issues in their own work that are stimulated by the lecture-material and there will be ample time for discussion.
Saturday, September 11, 2021; 9:30 am – 12:30 pm (EST) via Zoom
Cost: $50 2.5 MHC and Social Work CEUs offered
Donald Kalsched, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst currently living in Maine. He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters as well as two important books, The Inner World of Trauma; Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit (Routledge, 1996), and Trauma and the Soul; a Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption (Routledge, 2013), both of which have been translated into many languages. He is a member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe, a training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He teaches and lectures nationally and internationally on the subject of early trauma and its treatment. For more information or to contact Dr. Kalsched, visit www.donaldkalsched.com
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