Donald Kalsched Ph.D, Psychoanalyst, Author, International Lecturer

https://www.donaldkalsched.com

Inner and Outer Democracy: What Trauma-Psychology has to teach us about Healing Our Polarised World

In this lecture, Dr. Kalsched will describe a totalitarian or fascistic inner ‘system’ of archetypal defensive powers typical of the dissociative psychology found in survivors of early trauma, and will contrast this with the more democratic conflict psychology found in more integrated individuals.  While both these psychologies exist side by side in everyone, the more primitive totalitarian system, with its binary extremes of good and evil, and its reliance on both violence and illusion, tends to take over in times of individual or collective stress such as we are living through collectively today, where much of outer reality is simply more than we can bear.  The result is a radical and polarized psychology which, by violently ejecting the ‘painful’ or ‘bad’ aspects of experience from the boundaries of the self or nation, destroys the inner democracy required for wholeness and health.  In a final part of the lecture he will suggest ways in which we can address this problem both individually and collectively.

Dr Kalsched is one of the world’s leading analysts and writers specialising in trauma. He is a  Jungian Psychoanalyst

and Clinical Psychologist in private practice in Brunswick, Maine, USA. He is the author of two major books in the field of Depth Psychology: The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit (Routledge, 1996), and Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption (Routledge, 2013). Both have been translated into many languages.

Dr. Kalsched teaches and lectures internationally, pursuing his inter-disciplinary interest in early trauma and dissociation theory and its mytho-poetic manifestations in the mythic and religious iconography of many cultures.

(Last updated July 2021)