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This book is in some ways a collective enantiodromia—a vitalizing psychic counter to the deadening global experience of the COVID pandemic. During lockdown in 2020–2021, Luisa Zoppi organized an online course entitled “Feeling-Toned Complexes and Treatment of Trauma”. It was taught by members of the Italian Analytical Association, as well as international colleagues including Martin Schmidt. Zoppi and Schmidt, both Jungian analysts, subsequently decided to turn the course lectures into this 16-chapter volume exploring the treatment of trauma from a contemporary, primarily post-Jungian perspective. The individual authors come from multidisciplinary backgrounds—analytical psychology, psychiatry, clinical psychology, neuropsychology, neuropaediatrics—and circumambulate different aspects of trauma from their diverse academic and clinical perspectives. Eight essays are written by Italian analysts, the remaining eight by Jungians from the “rest of the world”, from UK to China to Venezuela. The result is a wide-ranging volume exploring the complexities of trauma, with in-depth patient-analyst interactions illustrating clinical process, impasse and the possibilities of psychic development.
Throughout, two core theoretical ideas underpin the post-Jungian understanding of trauma. In Chapter 1, Zoppi explores Jung's theory of the dissociative, autonomous nature of feeling-toned complexes, which become more deeply fragmented when the unbearable affects of trauma and a person's “inner predisposition” (p. 20) collide. In Chapter 2, Donald Kalsched explains his influential Self-care System in which extreme, archetypal, dissociated defences violently protect against whatever might be perceived as threatening the hidden, vulnerable, core self.
Thereafter, the book is divided into four parts exploring different aspects of trauma, personal and collective. Part 1 focuses on the devastations of early relational trauma: preverbal, unmetabolizable and unrepresentable, it overwhelms the infa