This is a book about the inner world of trauma as it has been revealed to me in the dreams, fantasies, and interpersonal struggles of patients involved in the psychoanalytic process. By focusing on the "inner world" of trauma I hope to illustrate how the psyche responds inwardly to overwhelming life events. What happens in the inner world, for example, when life in the outer world becomes unbearable? What do dreams tell us about the inner "object-images" of the psyche? And how do these "inner objects" compensate for the catastrophic experience with "outer objects"? What patterns of unconscious fantasy provide an inner meaning to the trauma victim when life-shattering events destroy outer meaning altogether? Finally, what do these inner images and fantasy structures tell us about the miraculous life-saving defenses that assure the survival of the human spirit when it is threatened by the annihilating blow of trauma? These are some of the questions I will attempt to answer in the following pages.

Throughout the discussion that follows, I will be using the word trauma to mean any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. For an experience to be "unbearable" means that it overwhelms the usual defensive measures which Freud described as a "protective shield against stimuli." Trauma of this magnitude varies from the acute, shattering experiences of child abuse so prominent in the literature today to the more "cumulative traumas" of unmet dependency-needs that mount up to devastating effect in some children's development, including the more acute deprivations of infancy described by Winnicott as "primitive agonies," the experience of which is "unthinkable." The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut called "disintegration anxiety," an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self."

To experience such anxiety threatens the total annihilation of the human personality, the destruction of the personal spirit. This must be avoided at all costs and so, because such trauma often occurs in early infancy before a coherent ego (and its defenses) is formed, a second line of defenses comes into play to prevent the "unthinkable" from being experienced. These defenses and their elaboration in unconscious fantasy will be the focus of my investigation. In psychoanalytic language, they are variously known as the "primitive" or "dissociative" defenses; for example, splitting, projective identification, idealization or diabolization, trance-states, switching among multiple centers of identity, depersonalization, psychic numbing, etc. Psychoanalysis has long understood that these primitive defenses both characterize severe psychopathology and also (once in place) cause it. But rarely in our contemporary literature do these defenses get any "credit," so to speak, for having accomplished anything in the preservation of life for the person whose heart is broken by trauma. And while everyone agrees how maladaptive these defenses are in the later life of the patient, few writers have acknowledged the miraculous nature of these defenses -- their life-saving sophistication or their archetypal nature and meaning.

For insights into these matters we turn to C. G. Jung and to dreams -- but not to Jung as he has classically been interpreted, and not to dream images as they are understood by many clinicians today. Instead, in Chapter 3 we go back to the early dialogue between Freud and Jung where both were struggling to understand the "mythopoetic" fantasy images that were thrown up by the psyche as the sequelae of trauma. During this fruitful time, and before their tragic split and the s ubsequent reification of their theories, they each brought an experimental openness to the psyche's mysteries -- an openness we must try to recover if we are to understand trauma and its meaning. In Chapter 3 we follow their dialogue to the point where it came apart, and we discover that it did so around the question of how to understand the "daimonic" and "uncanny" images of trauma-linked dream and fantasy.

If we study the impact of trauma on the psyche with one eye on traumatic outer events and one eye on dreams and other spontaneous fantasy-products that occur in response to outer trauma, we discover the remarkable mythopoetic imagery that makes up the "inner world of trauma" and that proved to be so exciting to both Freud and Jung. And yet neither Freud's nor Jung's interpretations of this imagery have proven entirely satisfactory to many clinicians today, including the present author. For this reason, a new interpretation of trauma-linked fantasy follows in the ensuing pages -- one that combines elements from both Freud and Jung. This "new" interpretation relies a great deal on dreams that immediately follow some traumatic moments in the patient's life. Careful study of such dreams in the clinical situation leads to our main hypothesis that the archaic defenses associated with trauma are personified as archetypal daimonic images. In other words, trauma-linked dream imagery represents the psyche's self-portrait of its own archaic defensive operations.

In the clinical material to follow we will find examples of this imagery in the dreams of contemporary patients, all of whom have struggled with the devastating impact of trauma on their lives. We will see how, at certain critical times in the working through of trauma, dreams give us a spontaneous picture of the psyche's "second line of defenses" against the annihilation of the personal spirit. In providing these "self-portraits" of the psyche's own defensive operations, dreams aid in the healing process by symbolizing affects and fragments of personal experience that have been heretofore unrepresentable to consciousness. The idea that dreams should be capable, in this way, of representing the psyche's dissociative activities and holding its fragmented pieces together in one dramatic story is a kind of miracle of psychological life which we may too easily take for granted. Usually, when dreams do this, no one is listening. In depth psychotherapy, we try to listen.

What dreams reveal and what recent clinical research has shown are that when trauma strikes the developing psyche of a child, a fragmentation of consciousness occurs in which the different "pieces" (Jung called the splinter-psyches or complexes) organize themselves according to certain archaic and typical (archetypal) patterns, most commonly dyads or syzygies made up of personified "beings." Typically, one part of the ego regresses to the infantile period, and another part progresses, i.e., grows up too fast and becomes precociously adapted to the outer world, often as a "false self." The progressed part of the personality then caretakes the regressed part. This dyadic structure has been independently discovered by clinicians of many different theoretical persuasions -- a fact that indirectly supports its archetypal basis. We explore the writings of these clinicians in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6.

In dreams, the regressed part of the personality is usually represented as a vulnerable, young, innocent (often feminine) child- or animal-self who remains shamefully hidden. Occasionally it appears as a special animal -- a favorite pet, a kitten, puppy, or bird. Whatever its particular incarnation, this "innocent" remainder of the whole self seems to represent a core of the individual's imperishable personal spirit -- what the ancient Egyptians called the "Ba-soul," or Alchemy, the winged animating spirit of the transformation process, i.e., Hermes/Mercuries. This spirit has always been a mystery -- an essence of selfhood never to be fully comprehended. It is the imperishable essence of the personality -- that which Winnicott referred to as the "True Self" and which Jung, seeking a construct that would honor its transpersonal origins, called the Self. The violation of this inner core of the personality is unthinkable. When other defenses fail, archetypal defenses will go to any length to protect the Self -- even to the point of killing the host personality in which this personal spirit is housed (suicide).

Meanwhile, the progressed part of the personality is represented in dreams by a powerful benevolent or malevolent great being who protects or persecutes its vulnerable partner, sometimes keeping it imprisoned within. Occasionally, in its protective guise, the benevolent/malevolent being appears as an angel or a miraculous wild animal such as a special horse or a dolphin. More often the "caretaking" figure is daimonic and terrifying to the dream-ego. In the clinical material of Chapters 1 and 2 we will explore cases in which it presents itself as a diabolical axeman, a murderer with a shotgun, a mad doctor, a menacing "cloud," a seductive "food demon," or as the Devil himself. Sometimes the malevolent inner tormenter turns another face and presents a more benevolent aspect, thereby identifying himself as a "duplex" figure, a protector and persecutor in one. Examples of this are found in Chapter 2.

Together, the "mythologized" images of the "progressed vs. regressed" parts of the self make up what I call the psyche's archetypal self-care system. The "system" is archetypal because it is both archaic and typical of the psyche's self-preservative operations, and because it is developmentally earlier and more primitive than normal ego-defenses. Because these defenses seem to be "coordinated" by a deeper center in the personality than the ego, they have been referred to as "defenses of the Self." We will see that this is an apt theoretical designation because it underscores the "numinous" awesome character of this "mythopoetic" structure and because the malevolent figure in the self-care system presents a compelling image of what Jung called the dark side of the ambivalent Self. In exploring this imagery in dream, transference, and myth, we will see that Jung's original idea of the Self as the central regulatory and ordering principle of the unconscious psyche requires revision under conditions of severe trauma.

The self-care system performs the self-regulatory and inner/outer mediational functions that, under normal conditions, are performed by the person's functioning ego. Here is where a problem arises. Once the trauma defense is organized, all relations with the outer world are "screened" by the self-care system. What was intended to be a defense against further trauma becomes a major resistance to all unguarded spontaneous expressions of self in the world The person survives but cannot live creatively. Psychotherapy becomes necessary.

However, psychotherapy with the victims of early trauma is not easy, either for the patient or the therapist. The resistance thrown up by the self-care system in the treatment of trauma victims is legendary. As early as 1920, Freud was shaken by the extent to which a "daimonic" force in some patients resisted change and made the usual work of analysis impossible. So pessimistic was he about this "repetition compulsion" that he attributed its origin to an instinctive aim in all life towards death. Subsequently, clinicians working with the victims of trauma or abuse have readily recognized the "daimonic" figure or forces to which Freud alludes. Fairbairn described it as an "Internal Saboteur" and Guntrip as the "anti-libidinal ego" attacking the "libidinal ago." Melanie Klein described the child's fantasies of a cruel, attacking, "bad breast;" Jung described the "negative Animus" and more recently, Jeffrey Seinfeld has written about an internal structured called simply the "Bad Object."

Most contemporary analytic writers are inclined to see this attacking figure as an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has "possessed" the inner world of the trauma victim. But this popularized view is only half correct. The diabolical inner figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator, indicating that we are dealing here with a psychological factor set loose in the inner world by trauma -- an archetypal traumatogenic agency within the psyche itself.

No matter how frighting his or her brutality, the function of this ambivalent caretaker always seems to be the protection of the traumatized remainder of the personal spirit and its isolation from reality. It functions, if we can imagine its inner rationale, as a kind of inner "Jewish Defense League" (whose slogan, after the Holocaust, reads "never Again!"). "Never again," says our tyrannical caretaker, will the traumatized personal spirit of this child suffer this badly! Never again will it be this helpless in the face of cruel reality....before this happens I will disperse it into fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression]....In this way I will preserve what is left of this prematurely amputated childhood -- of an innocence that has suffered too much too soon!"

Despite the otherwise well-intentioned nature of our Protector/Persecutor, there is a tragedy lurking in these archetypal defenses. And here we come to the crux of the problem for the traumatized individual and simultaneously the crux of the problem for the psychotherapist trying to help. This incipient tragedy results from the fact that the Protector/Persecutor is not educable. The primitive defense does not learn anything about realistic danger as the child grows up. It functions on the magical level of consciousness with the same level of awareness it had when the original trauma or traumas occurred. Each new life opportunity is mistakenly seen as a dangerous threat of re-traumatization and is therefore attacked. In this way, the archaic defenses become anti-life forces which Freud understandably thought of as part of the death instinct.

These discoveries made by exploring the inner world help us to explain two of the most disturbing findings in the literature about trauma. The first of these finding is that the traumatized psyche is self-traumatizing. Trauma doesn't end with the cessation of outer violation, but continues unabated in the inner world of the trauma victim, whose dreams are often haunted by persecutory inner figures. The second finding is the seemingly perverse fact that the victim of psychological trauma continually finds himself or herself in life situations where he or she is retraumatized. As much as he or she wants to change, as hard as he or she tries to improve life or relationships, something more powerful than the ego continually undermines progress and destroys hope. It is as though the persecutory inner world somehow finds its outer mirror in repeated self-defeating "re-enactments" -- almost as if the individual were possessed by some diabolical power or pursued by a malignant fate.

In the first chapter of the book we will anchor these preliminary ideas in three clinical cases and several important dreams which illustrate the diabolical side of the Self in early trauma. In Chapter 2 further examples enrich the picture by showing the self-soothing aspects of the self-care system in addition to its diabolical aspects. In Chapter 3 we will trace Freud and Jung's initial explorations of trauma's inner world and show that Jung had independently "discovered" our dyadic defensive structure as early as 1910, although he did not label it as such. In Chapter 4 we provide a compilation of Jung's views as they relate to trauma, beginning with Jung's personal boyhood trauma and how it informed his later theory. Chapter 5 reviews and critiques additional Jungian contributors to a clinical theory of trauma, and Chapter 6 surveys psychoanalytic theorists, focusing on those who describe a structure similar to our trauma defense.

By the end of Part I, the reader should have a good sense of how the dyadic defense functions in the inner world as seen from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and also an awareness of its recurrent, universal features. Given the mythopoetic features described in Part I, it will come as o surprise that these primordial defenses of the Self frequently appear in mythological material, and the demonstration of this fact is the purpose of Part II of the book. In these chapters, we will interpret several fairy tales and a short myth, the tale of Eros and Psyche (Chapter 8), in order to show how the personified imagery of the self-care system appears in mythological material. Readers unacquainted with Jung's approach may find such attention to folklore and mythology somewhat strange in a psychological work, but we must remember, as Jung has repeated point out, that mythology is where the psyche "was" before psychology made it an object of scientific investigation. By drawing attention to the parallels between the findings of clinical psychoanalysis and ancient religious ideation we demonstrate how the psychological struggle of contemporary patients (and those of us trying to help them) runs rather deeper into the symbolic phenomenology of the human soul than recent psychoanalytic discussions of trauma or the "dissociative disorders" are inclined to acknowledge. Not everyone is helped by an understanding of these parallels, but some people are, and for them, this "binocular" way of viewing, simultaneously, the psychological and religious phenomena is equivalent to finding a deeper meaning to their suffering, and this in itself can be healing. It is not an accident that our discipline is called "depth psychology," but for psychology to remain deep, it must keep one "eye," so to speak, on the life of man's spirit, and the vicissitudes of the spirit (including its dark manifestations) are nowhere so well documented as in the great symbol-systems of religion, mythology, and folklore. In this way, psychology and religion share, as it were, a common concern with the dynamics of human interiority.

In Chapter 7, we find our self-care system personified in the Grimms' fairy tale of the innocent Rapunzel under the protective but persecutory guardianship of the witch, and we explore some of the clinical implications of how to get this psychical "child" out of her tower. Chapter 8 describes a similar "captivity story," i.e., that of Eros and Psyche; and in Chapter 9, we explore an especially violent rendition of the Self's dark aspect in the fairy tale of Fitcher's Bird, on of the popular Bluebeard cycle of tales. Chapter Ten concludes the book with an analysis of a Scandinavian tale of Prince Lindworm, and emphasizes the role of sacrifice and choice in the resolution of the trauma defense. Throughout the latter chapters, implications for the treatment of trauma victims are interspersed in the mythic material.

By focusing the following investigation on the inner world of trauma, especially on unconscious fantasy as illustrated in dreams, transference, and mythology, we will be attempting to honor the reality of the psyche in ways that much current literature about trauma fails to do, or does only secondarily. By the reality of the psyche, I mean an intermediate realm of experience which serves as a ligament connecting the inner self and the outer world by means of symbolic processes which communicate a sense of "meaning." In my experience, a sense of the reality of the psyche is extremely elusive and hard to maintain, even for the experienced psychotherapist, because it means staying open to the unknown -- to a mystery at the center of our work -- and this is very difficult, especially in the area of trauma, where moral outrage is so easily aroused and with it the need for simple answers.

In an effort to place the present study in context, we should note that psychoanalysis began in a study of trauma almost 100 years ago, but it then suffered a kind of professional amnesia on the subject. In recent years there is some indication that the profession is returning to a "trauma paradigm" once again. This renaissance of interest in trauma has been motivated by the cultural "rediscovery" of childhood physical and sexual abuse, and psychiatry's revived interest in the dissociative disorders, especially Multiple Personality Disorder and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, this literature has escaped comment by Jungian writers. This fact is all the more peculiar given Jung's relevant model of the psyche's dissociability and his emphasis on ego-Self "indivisibility" (individuation). I believe that Jung's insights into the inner world of the traumatized psyche are especially important for contemporary psychoanalysis while, at the same time, contemporary work on trauma requires a revision of Jungian theory. The present work is an effort, on the one hand, to illustrate the value of Jung's contributions, while attempting, on the other hand, to offer certain theoretical revisions made necessary in my judgment by the findings of trauma researchers and clinicians, especially those of ocntemporary object-relations and self-psychologists.

The reader should be forewarned that at least two different psychoanalytic "dialects" define the language of the present investigation and the argument moves freely back and forth between them. On the one side is British object-relations -- especially Winnicott -- together with some of Heinz Kohut's self-psychology and, on the other, is the mythopoetic language of C. G. Jung and his followers. I consider both of these idioms essential for an understanding of trauma and its treatment.

Some of the observations in these chapters have appeared elsewhere in prints and others have been the subject of extended lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and at the Center for Depth Psychology and Jungian Studies in Katonah, New York. But the full implications of my earlier ideas for a theory of trauma and its treatment were not clear until recently. Even so, the present volume should be considered as little more than provisional -- a preliminary effort to cast some light into that dark background of unconscious imagery making up the "inner world of trauma."