Response to Don Kalsched's ‘Daimonic elements in early trauma’ and Elizabeth Urban's ‘Developmental aspects of trauma and traumatic aspects of development’

Kalsched is well known as the author of The Inner World of Trauma, in which he examines ‘what happens in the inner world … when life in the outer world becomes unbearable’. This book presented another way of looking at and understanding the inner world phenomena which arose in response to trauma, defined as ‘unbearable anxiety’. By carefully examining the dreams which immediately followed the events his patients described, Kalsched found that he was being presented with images of the way the psyche defended itself. The metaphor he used to describe this imagery was that it was a portrait of an archetypal defence system. Kalsched's thesis is that these defence systems are attempts by the patient to contain the trauma and can act as an obstacle to the therapeutic endeavour. Masud Khan, quoted by Kalsched, referred to this difficulty in working with traumatized patients as ‘the difficulty in making progress with the patient's practice of self cure’. The latter phrase has been adapted by Kalsched who calls this defensive system a ‘self care system’.

Kalsched's work illustrates the fact that while we are getting better at seeing where illness has started and where its roots may lie, we still find it extremely difficult to shift the effects of years of our patients looking after themselves in ways which are no longer adapted to reality. When it becomes apparent to Kalsched's patients that their self cure/self care systems are not working, they seek help.

Kalsched has developed a theory based on his clinical experience that this ‘self care’ system, once an ally and defence against further trauma, contributes to the atrophying of the creative and life-giving qualities of the self. This ‘self care’ system can be thought of as a version of Fordham's defences of the self. Kalsched describes it as if a part of the psyche outside the ego reacts to what feels like a repetition in the transference of the original trauma, sometimes called re-traumatization, (wrongly and inaccurately i