Opening the Closed Heart: Affect Focused Clinical Work with the Victims of Early Trauma

It is well known that severe trauma leads to powerful dissociative defenses, which help the child to survive, but also injure the capacity to feel. In this seminar we will explore ways to restore this feeling-capacity through body-centered attention to affect-in-the-moment in the psychoanalytic situation. Using the speaker’s personal experience while in analysis as well as a case of severe early trauma, Dr. Kalsched will demonstrate the consciousness-killing effect of primitive defenses and show how body-sensitive techniques hold the promise of restoring the patient’s sense of aliveness and hence, opening the unconscious to those affect-images that are the building blocks of the human imagination. New findings in attachment theory, affective neuro-science and somatically attuned ways of working in the psychotherapy process, will also be discussed. Participants are encouraged to bring issues in their own work that are stimulated by the lecture-material and there will be ample time for discussion.