ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy with trauma victims is like a journey into the ‘land of the dead’. After suffering the trauma of his separation from Freud, Jung made this assertion in his memoirs: ‘I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world’ (Jung 1965: 181). In this metaphoric territory, trauma victims experience an emotional loss of soul and a bisecting of the meaningful and creative relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. The wholeness of the psyche dissipates, and life dissociates into fragments resulting in suffering and despair. Such a process can take place after serious traumas that affect the victim’s linguistic symbolization. Verbal images are no longer easily created, and the mechanisms integrating body and psyche cease to operate. Victims who have undergone major traumas in their childhood ranging from bloodcurdling abandonment anxieties to sexual abuse to complex traumas involving physical and emotional exploitation are cast into this dark and terrifying land, as are those who have survived terror attacks or fiercely disruptive war experiences. On the therapeutic journey with these post-trauma victims, therapists become acquainted with the traumatic memories and shocking experiences that flood their psyches. The alchemical mystery of how their bisected and shattered psyches reintegrate remains just that – a mystery.
