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Donald Kalsched has produced an important sequel to his earlier seminal The Inner World of Trauma . He has again demonstrated his gift for uniting Jungian theory with the larger psychoanalytic tradition, and he beautifully illustrates some of the ways in which psychotherapy can be a spiritual process. Kalsched describes the ways in which archetypal defences protect an essential core of the person, the fragile personal spirit or the soul, from unbearable affects produced by early trauma. He calls these defences the self-care system. This structure appears in the patient's dreams as archetypal or mythopoetic imagery, for example, as angels or demons. The self-care system protects the person from re-experiencing his or her original trauma and from disintegration anxiety, but does so at a high price; it prevents trusting attachment, resists healing, and prevents the full embodiment of the soul. The self-care system performs self-regulatory functions and mediates between the inner and outer worlds in a way that is normally carried out by the healthy ego, but also prevents spontaneous self-expression. The traumatized person survives but may not be able to live creatively, although he has privileged access to the spiritual dimension. Kalsched amplifies his patients' experience using the figure of Dis, from Dante's Inferno.
The extinction of the personal spirit must be avoided at all costs, so primitive defensive operations are deployed to make sure that overwhelming affect is not fully experienced as an accessible memory. Instead these affects are dissociated, sometimes appearing as hallucinations, sometimes evacuated into the body to appear as physical symptoms or acted out in a repetition compulsion, sometimes in the transference. The inner world is no longer coherent—bits of affect and images float in a disconnected way. The person lives in constant terror of a catastrophe that has in fact already happened but which cannot be remembered. This situation causes severe psyc