In Early Trauma, Dissociation, and the Un-remembered Child, Donald Kalsched builds upon the discoveries of the 'Self-care System' of dissociative defences he presented in his first two books, tracing these archaic defenses back in time to their roots in the earliest formative period of infancy, a time when the child’s experience is still mostly unformulated.

In this new book, the focus is shifted to the overwhelming feelings that the system defends against and shows how these feelings originate in early attachment-traumas occurring at a time when the child’s experience is still mostly unformulated. Extended clinical vignettes in every chapter show how early un-remembered trauma finds its way into the relational field of the analytic partners, re-creating early attachment-crises, yet offering unprecedented opportunities for healing and repair--provided that the analyst is willing to risk and expose his own emotional vulnerability--all while maintaining clear boundaries and an ethical stance in the work. In this way the book attempts to combine the best in current empirical research about infancy and early child development with the best in Jung’s timeless approach to the unfolding of those deep potentials represented by the symbolic “child” in the psyche.

This is a book that helps restore the connection between the symbolic world of the adult psyche and the pre-symbolic dissociated world of infancy with its un-formulated experience and its un-remembered childhood trauma. It will be of particular interest to practicing psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, analytical psychologists, expressive arts therapists, and all those who seek deeper meaning in their therapeutic work.

Donald Kalsched is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Psychoanalyst in private practice in Brunswick Maine. He is a member of the Maine Jung Center in Brunswick, the C. G. Jung Institute of New England, and the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts where he regularly teaches and supervises candidates in training. He is the author of many journal articles, book chapters, interviews, and 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.