Jung Bytes - December 2007

An Interview with Donald Kalsched - December, 2007

By Lauren Yanks

JUNG IN IRELAND
“Splitting, Reconciliation and Repair: Moving Toward Healing and Wholeness”

Below are excerpts from an interview I conducted with Donald Kalsched, Ph.D.
Don will be leading a discussion and running workshops at our Jung in Ireland's "Splitting, Reconciliation and Repair: Moving Toward Healing and Wholeness" seminar in Belfast and Donegal from March 27- April 3, 2008.

Don Kalsched is a clinical psychologist and Jungian Analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and is also a senior training analyst at the Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Bedford Hills, NY. His popular book, “The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit” is currently in its 5th printing. Don lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is at work on a new book entitled, “Trauma and the Soul: Spiritual Aspects of Psychoanalytic Work”.


One of your talks at the Jung in Ireland seminar this March is titled “Splitting, Reconciliation and Repair: Moving Toward Healing and Wholeness in a Broken World”. Can you talk a bit about this?

Well, one of Jung’s major contributions was to describe how the psyche dissociates under stressful or traumatic circumstances, splitting into different parts in order to make an otherwise unbearable experience tolerable.  This is a natural process, although it often leads to a pathological outcome, because once splitting occurs, the psyche cannot order itself from within—cannot “re-integrate” itself—and the split-off parts become antagonistic to one another, begin to war against each other. 
The result is psychopathology—neurosis, or worse.  The same is true within groups of people, collectives such as an institution or a state or a nation. Traumatic events may occur for a whole people, like our 9/11 for example. Pain and anxiety mount and splitting begins. Just like with the individual, if the “self” of a society is not held together by a flexible polity like a democratic government, such splitting can degenerate into a kind of civil war.  Ireland went through such a painful experience.  So did the United States. 

Jung also made us aware that once splitting processes have begun, the ego of the person or collective entity, is weakened, and very powerful forces—archetypal energies—come roaring up from the collective layer of the unconscious like lava from a volcano.  These energies are primitive and operate on an “all-or-none” principle such as good/evil, right/wrong, innocent/depraved.  They make splitting worse because they infuse simple human conflicts with “religious” fervor, turning them into “totalistic” categories, idealizing one side, diabolizing the other.  A victim/perpetrator psychology develops which takes the form of “we are good and pure and innocent and they are bad and evil and violent.”  This psychology defends us from the pain and anxiety that started the splitting in the first place.

For example, the word “terrorist” which we hear so often in our national debate, expresses the negative pole of one of these archetypal antinomies.  “Terrorists” are no longer human, they have fallen off the spectrum of humanity into “absolute evil” and therefore (it is claimed) they need to be exterminated.  If you’ll notice, we rarely hear about the personal suffering, the broken lives—the shattered hopes of people we label as “terrorists?”  They too have a human story, but we are too “terrified” and polarized to see it and too full of righteous archetypal rage to look for it.  It takes hard work to see the humanity in the “enemy.”

So, how can this be healed?

Well, you see,  although splitting and polarizing tendencies of the fear-dominated  psyche are strong, Jung also emphasized the healing, integrative capacity of the psyche….it’s deep urgency to unite conflicting extremes in a greater wholeness. The imagery associated with this wholeness is also archetypal and there is a great longing for it in all people and a recognition, deep down, that to work for it and accomplish it, is sacred work…..the work of peace-making. 
We see this in the enduring idealism just waiting to be unlocked in people all over the world-- it if can just be liberated from the overlay of defenses that prevent us from feeling the original pain of trauma. This gives us hope that all the splitting we see today can be healed. 
We now know what’s needed to do this for the individual and we can apply these lessons to our collective life as well.  I will be exploring these ideas in my lectures and workshops. Ireland is a wonderful place to do this because its people have been through the agony of splitting and the ecstasy of healing.  We’ll be exploring these things in a land where it’s actually happened.

What drew you to study Jung?

I was drawn to Jung’s awareness that religions all over the world expressed a common understanding about the longings in the human soul, the great predicament we know as our “human condition.”  They tell us something about the universal psyche that is shared by all of us.  So they could unite us.  And yet the “powers” they help us access are also the powers that inflate us with righteous anger, vengeance and splitting.  So religious energies, unless protected by a “secular”, human, and rational democratic process (this process develops the ego in personal psychology) can run amok, leading to more violence and splitting. 
Knowing this instinctively, the founders of our country envisioned a “wall” separating church and state.  In psychotherapy we also work to create such a separation (we call it a witnessing or observing ego) within the person, so they can live their lives without repeated invasions of violent energy from the archetypal world. I’m convinced you can’t understand trauma and its healing without understanding the archetypal roots of religion in the human soul.

What do you hope people come away with after your talks and workshops at the Jung in Ireland seminar?

I hope they will come away with a deeper understanding of the dynamics of splitting in themselves and the collective and more importantly, that they will gain a deeper understanding of how splitting can be undone—of the great, difficult, and wonderful pathway towards peace…in ourselves and in our world.