Donald Kalsched expands on the investigation he started in his previous book, The Inner World of Trauma (1996), in Trauma and the Soul by delving further into the mystical or spiritual experiences that frequently surround the intimacies of psychoanalytic practice. He demonstrates how depth psychotherapy with trauma survivors may introduce both analytic partners to “another dimension” of extrasensory reality where daimonic powers—both good and dark—reside through lengthy clinical vignettes that include therapeutic discussion and dreams. According to him, this mytho-poetic world is an everlasting fact of human experience rather than just a defensive byproduct of our struggle with life’s harsh realities, as Freud suggested. It is a mystery that is sometimes at the very center of the healing process while at other times strangely resists it.

As he develops an integrated psycho-spiritual approach to trauma and its therapy, chapter after chapter, with these “two worlds” in focus, Kalsched examines a number of issues, including:

Dreams that depict the lost soul-child and explain how this “kid” signifies a vital center of aliveness that is both safeguarded and persecuted by the psyche’s defenses;
The Little Prince and its central place in a person’s spiritual life; how clinical attention to implicit processes in the relational field, as well as developments in body-based affective neuroscience, are making trauma treatment more effective; the life of C.G. Jun; and Dante’s guided descent into the Inferno of Hell as a paradigm for the psychotherapy process and its inevitable struggle with self-destructive energies

This book brings back the element of mystery to psychoanalytic practice. It highlights tales of regular people—patients and psychotherapists—who, through collaboration, catch a glimpse of the truth of the human soul and the breadth of the spirit and are transformed by the encounter. Psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, analytical psychologists, and expressive arts therapists, especially those with a “spiritual” bent, will be particularly interested in Trauma and the Soul.

Donald Kalsched is a training analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and a Jungian analyst in private practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has written several publications in the field of analytical psychology and frequently gives seminars on the topic of childhood trauma and how to cure it. Among his publications is The Inner World of Trauma (1996).