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Healing Trauma: The Soul in Hell and its Liberation: Reflections on Clinical Depression in Light of Dante’s Divine Comedy
November 12, 2016 @ 10:00 am - 3:00 pm PST
$90.00Trauma survivors often report that their lives are a “living Hell.” This pathological situation is created by the psyche’s archetypal defenses and their depressive power over what one psychoanalyst called “the lost heart of the self,” with its desire for love and intimate relationship. Psychotherapy of this condition involves what the medieval theologians called a “Descendit ad Inferos“–a harrowing descent into all the hellish un-remembered pain of the patient’s early life. Dante’s Divine Comedy gives us a beautiful literary example of such a companioned descent, as Virgil and Dante descend into the nether regions in order to heal the poet’s mid-life depression. Following Dante and his guide down to their confrontation with the “dark Lord” of Hades, Dr. Kalsched will show in this slide-illustrated lecture how depth psychotherapy in conjunction with affective neuro-science, and the findings of attachment theory and relational theory all lead toward answers of the central question posed by both the clinical and literary material, vis. how can the otherwise sealed crypt of Hell be opened and its occupants liberated?
Related Lecture: Healing Trauma: The Lost and Recovered Soul in Depth Psychotherapy
Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., is a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist who practices in Brunswick, Maine. He is a senior faculty member and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (IRSJA), and lectures nationally and internationally on the subject of early trauma, its effect on the inner world, and its treatment. His celebrated book The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit (Routledge 1996) explores the interface between contemporary psychoanalytic theory and Jungian thought as it relates to practical clinical work with the survivors of early childhood trauma. His next book, Trauma and the Soul: A Psychospiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption (Routledge, 2013) explores some of the mystical or “spiritual” dimensions of clinical work with trauma-survivors. He and his wife Robin live in Topsham, Maine, during the winter, and summer in Newfoundland, Canada.