This is our Jung Memorial Lecture. Around the world Jung Societies, Centers and Institutes do Memorial Lectures to commemorate the death of Jung on June 6, 1961. We seek a world-known, senior analyst to do this lecture and we have been fortunate to have Donald Kalsched in the past and again this year. His work is complex and satisfying. We are delighted to welcome him for this special occasion.
The process of realizing oneself as a person (“individuation”) was for C. G. Jung equivalent to the unfolding of latent potentials in the personality–a vital spark of aliveness–something sacred and utterly unique in each of us. The potential for this “unfolding,” Jung felt, lay deep in the foundations of the personality, like a seed, and was universally represented in mythology as the archetype of the innocent orphaned child in exile.
Trauma in childhood accounts for such exile. By studying the lives of people who have survived early trauma, we discover that the ideal “unfolding” of the personality Jung envisioned is partially blocked and distorted by powerful-but-necessary archetypal defenses. These defenses divide up the inner world and banish unbearably painful feelings to the unconscious where they continue to live in “suspended animation” as implicit memories or as the orphaned specters of a traumatic childhood. When psychotherapy begins, these wounded, ghost-like remnants of our childhood selves re-emerge, seeking acceptance and healing. If accepted, they also bring with them a numinous, ineffable dimension that often accompanies the experience of healing.
However, the recovery of these lost parts of the self is often strongly resisted by the psyche’s defensive powers and their organization in a “system” (Self-Care System) of both protection and persecution. Successful psychotherapy depends on our understanding of these dynamics.
