ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experience of reading Donald Kalsched’s book “The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit” and examines one of his subsequent papers “Archetypal affect, anxiety and defence in patients who have suffered early trauma”. Kalsched explains the loss of a person’s self-agency as a defensive operation in the face of overwhelming affect. Kalsched recognises that a significant feature of the nature of the archetypal Self is an inability to change in response to the demands of the external world. Kalsched draws on Carl Gustav Jung’s differentiation of the Collective Unconscious from the Personal Unconscious to explicitly “give more credit” to the adjustment that has been operating internally before the patient seeks any external help. Psychoanalytic conceptualisations of a powerful inner agency or “inner voice” have often represented it as a defensive construction designed to avoid anxiety or dispose of hostility.
