Anne Malone interviews Donald Kalsched

An Interview with Donald Kalsched, author of The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit

AM: In reading your book, I have the sense that something new is being developed here.

DK: Well, I hope so. It might be fairer to say it's a new integration of a lot of material that has been in the field in a variety of ways. It's been known, for example, that there's a "tyrannical inner object" that has a great deal to do with psychological depression, with harsh super ego attack. Jung called it the negative animus. Odier calls it the "great malevolent beings in the psyche." Fairbairn calls it the internal saboteur, and Guntrip, the antilibidinal ego. What may be new in the book is my effort to show this as one half of what I call the "archetypal self care system," and that it's related to early trauma. If my hypothesis is correct, we can see this in dreams and other unconscious material as psyche's primitive defense. Building on what Fordham called "defenses of the Self," I suggest that in cases of early trauma, we see a remarkable wisdom in the psyche to assure survival of what I call the imperishable personal spirit, the essence of the person. That, along with seeing the destructive attack of the primitive Self — that effort to 'kill' outer relations in an effort to prevent further trauma — as analogous to auto-immune disease, I think may be new.

AM: How did you come to this insight?

DK: A number of years ago, I got interested in the fact that certain patients had dreams which seemed to contain images of unconscious defenses against strong affect. The dreamer might be suffering an encounter with frightening contents—let's say the dreamer is swimming in a lake near her childhood home at precisely the spot where at age four she almost drowned, and suddenly a large snake approaches in the water. As her fear mounts, suddenly the dream changes, and she's sitting in a sunny meadow with her favorite cat, feeling blissful. This break in the dream narrative shows us a dissociative defense — a place where her psyche is unable to metabolize unbearable anxiety (related to the early trauma) and the dream maker simply changes the story.