Dr. Donald Kalsched's Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption (2013) was one of my Best Books for 2013, and it was the long-awaited follow-up to his now classic first book, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit (1996). The unique depth and insight of his trauma model, which is partly Jungian, partly relational/intersubjective (psychoanalytic), partly somatic, and probably some other parts, as well, is innovative and powerful.

My friend Monica also posted recently about Dr. Kalsched - check it out at her excellent blog, Beyond Meds.

Shrink Rap Radio #416 – Trauma and The Soul with Donald Kalsched PhD

Dr. David Van Nuys
Posted on August 14, 2014



Donald Kalsched, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Psychoanalyst in private practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a senior training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts where he teaches and supervises. His 1996 book The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit has found a wide readership in both psychoanalytic and Jungian circles and has been translated into many languages. Dr. Kalsched teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, pursuing his inter-disciplinary interest in early trauma and dissociation theory and its mytho-poetic manifestations in the mythic and religious iconography of many cultures. His latest book Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption, was published in April, 2013.

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Check out the following Psychology CE Courses based on listening to Shrink Rap Radio interviews:

• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 1 (6 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 2 (7 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 3 (7 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 4 (6 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 5 (7 CEUs)
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• Positive Psychology (6 CEUs)
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• CERTIFICATE PROGRAM IN POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY (32 CEUs)
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• Brain: Insights from Neuroscience (8 CEUs)
• Meditation & Psychotherapy (8 CEUs)
• NEW! Crisis & Trauma: Identification, Assessment, & Treatment (15 CEUs)
• Neuroscience and Healing (8 CEUs)
• NEW! The Psychology of Relationships (7 CEUs)

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Polly Young-Eisendrath - Embracing Our Imperfect Life

Polly Young-Eisendrath is a Buddhist and a Jungian analyst, as well as authoring many excellent books, including The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering Into Insight And Renewal (1997), The Psychology of Mature Spirituality: Integrity, Wisdom, Transcendence (2000), Subject to Change: Jung, Gender and Subjectivity in Psychoanalysis (2004), and The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance (2009).

This is from a group blog she is part of at Psychology Today - it was one of the "Best of the Blogs" selections for this past week.

Embracing Our Imperfect Life

Listening to Leonard Cohen and learning to relish defeat.

Published on January 19, 2014 by The Contemporary Psychoanalysis Group in Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action
By Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D.

In my car on a sunny Vermont winter morning, I am listening to Leonard Cohen sing his view of reality: a Zen teaching on how to relish defeat. He says you can’t be a hero in your own life and, more important, you can’t be happy until you know how thoroughly broken life itself is, everyone’s life, not just yours. He sounds sexy and ironic and wise. There really is no one else quite like Leonard.

I am also thinking about what a therapy patient said to me yesterday: that he’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on four different psychotherapies, which have extended over most of his adult years. He is a minister and he’s in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with me. ALL this therapy, he said, was “a f***ing hopeless cause.” He’s never had the relationship he’s really wanted or a job that expresses his creativity or the self-confidence he should have. I work hard to understand his feelings and I delight in this man as a human being (flaws and all) and admire his dedication to his work. I praise his strengths and am interested in his weaknesses. I don’t have a “fix it” attitude towards him or his life.

As I think about my patient, I recall a teaching I heard from a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He noted that North Americans rarely appreciate the enormous privileges they enjoy every day: that we are free to talk and write about our ideas, feelings, and opinions. We are educated and encouraged to have our own points of view. By contrast, Rinpoche says, 80 percent of Tibetans are illiterate. Those who live in China are not free to speak their native language or to express their feelings and opinions about many things, including their own Tibetan culture and religion. I found Rinpoche’s reflections on American culture fresh and interesting. He did not criticize American materialism or our “fast” style, but he noticed how much we take our individual rights for granted.

Just as I am having warm thoughts about Rinpoche, Leonard is singing:

I fought against the bottle,
But I had to do it drunk –
Took my diamond to the pawnshop –
But that don’t make it junk.

I know that I’m forgiven,
But I don’t know how I know
I don’t trust my inner feelings –
Inner feelings come and go.

Of course, as a Zen practitioner myself, I know about Leonard’s distrust of inner feelings and of the Buddha’s cautionary teachings on the importance of watching our feelings arise and pass away instead of becoming invested in a narrative about them. This skill of “simply experiencing” our feelings – instead of discharging or suppressing them – is something I have incorporated into my psychotherapeutic work. I sit with people as they watch their shame, envy, joy, sadness or anger arise and pass away. This leads to a new kind of freedom. But there is something more in what Leonard is singing. He’s not ashamed that he fought against the bottle while he was drunk.

Admittedly, Leonard is a scoundrel and a hard man to pin down. After I read his biography, I stopped romanticizing him as my perfect soul mate! More than a handful of beautiful, kind, talented women have tried and failed to have a long-term love relationship with him. He has fought against commitment. His struggle with depression is legendary. And yet, his conviction that there is no ideal way to live conveys a remarkable grace, strength and freedom. This perspective--no ideal way to live--is often absent in my patients and in my psychoanalytic colleagues, as well.

We psychoanalysts can still sound as though there is an ideal way to live. Look closely into the lives of many great masters of art, literature, and spiritual practice and you will find abundant tribulation. Human beings who are challenged, even at a young age, to make sense of a world that is deeply disappointing and frustrating can become resilient and insightful in a way that supports a lifetime of transformation. The importance of anxiety, suffering, and difficulty cannot be overestimated in helping us appreciate how little is under our control.

My therapy patient is relentlessly and bitterly disappointed, even though he has meaningful creative work, a grown daughter who is doing well, and lots of friends. He often explains his bitterness in terms of his parents’ self-absorption, a narrative he developed as a result of years of psychotherapy. Instead of observing his inner feelings just coming and going, he relies on a particular story about his life: he has low self-esteem and lacks confidence due to his parents’ shortcomings. He ignores the richness he has developed in his inner life as a result of his freedom to examine his thoughts, feelings, and life story – freedom he has engaged over years of psychotherapy.

What I adore in Leonard Cohen is he is NOT advising us to grieve our losses and our flaws. He wants us to celebrate them. He wants us to develop a sense of humor about them and to see how they link us to one another. We are not gods. When you have to pawn your diamond because you run out of money, your diamond is not “a f***ing hopeless cause.”

What is most appealing about Leonard is not his accomplishments or perfections, but his poetic account of his peculiar failures and weaknesses. He teaches us, too, that our peculiarities can become our cherished particularities when we embrace our selves with lightness and friendship.

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a psychologist, speaker, writer, mindfulness teacher and Jungian analyst who maintains a clinical and consulting practice in central Vermont. A practicing Buddhist since 1971, she is also chairperson of the non-profit "Enlightening Conversations: Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Meeting in Person" that hosts conferences in cities around the USA.

Dr. Young-Eisendrath will speak at The William Alanson White Institute in New York City on Wednesday, February 5, 8 PM. To register, click here.

 

This article comes from a Special Issue of Behavioral Sciences: Analytical Psychology: Theory and Practice. This is the first article I have seen that examines the efficacy of Jungian psychodynamic psychotherapy, which Jung had named Analytical Psychotherapy.

Just for clarification, these are some of the characteristics of Psychodynamic therapy models, which can be quite diverse, although all of them believe to some extent in early attachment issues as a foundation for later mental health issues. To be clear, I disagree with some of the items in the list below, which comes from Wikipedia:

Although psychodynamic psychotherapy can take many forms, commonalities include:^[3]

• An emphasis on the centrality of intrapsychic and unconscious conflicts, and their relation to development. [The conflict model has fallen out of favor since Kohut developed his Self Psychology model in the 1970s, which looks more toward the interpersonal or relational dysfunctions as the source of psychological issues.]
• Seeing defenses as developing in internal psychic structures in order to avoid unpleasant consequences of conflict. [Defense mechanisms are now seen more as coping strategies to navigate psychologically painful traumas.]
• A belief that psychopathology develops especially from early childhood experiences.
• A view that internal representations of experiences are organized around interpersonal relations.
• A conviction that life issues and dynamics will re-emerge in the context of the client-therapist relationship as transference and counter-transference.
• Use of free association as a major method for exploration of internal conflicts and problems. [This is more a part of the psychoanalytic tradition.]
• Focusing on interpretations of transference, defense mechanisms, and current symptoms and the working through of these present problems.
• Trust in insight as critically important for success in therapy.

Typically when one sees the term "empirically-based therapy" or "evidence-based practice," what is being referred to is some form of cognitive therapy, often Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). However, as Jonathan Shedler demonstrated in his 2010 article, The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Therapy, psychodynamic therapies are as effective as CBT in the short term and more effective than CBT in the long-term.

Here is the abstract to the Shedler article, originally published in Scientific American Mind:

Empirical evidence supports the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy. Effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy are as large as those reported for other therapies that have been actively promoted as “empirically supported” and “evidence based.” In addition, patients who receive psychodynamic therapy maintain therapeutic gains and appear to continue to improve after treatment ends. Finally, nonpsychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because the more skilled practitioners utilize techniques that have long been central to psychodynamic theory and practice. The perception that psychodynamic approaches lack empirical support does not accord with available scientific evidence and may reflect selective dissemination of research findings.

Si it's good to see another model of psychodynamic therapy has proven itself to be "evidence-based" and beneficial for clients.

Full Citation:
Roesler, C. (2013, Oct 24). Evidence for the Effectiveness of Jungian Psychotherapy: A Review of Empirical Studies. Behavioral Sciences; 3(4): 562-575. doi:10.3390/bs3040562

Evidence for the Effectiveness of Jungian Psychotherapy: A Review of Empirical Studies

Christian Roesler 1,2

1. Clinical Psychology, Catholic University of Applied Sciences, Karlsstraße 63, 79104 Freiburg, Germany 

2. Faculty of Psychology, University Basel, Switzerland

Abstract

Since the 1990s several research projects and empirical studies (process and outcome) on Jungian Psychotherapy have been conducted mainly in Germany and Switzerland. Prospective, naturalistic outcome studies and retrospective studies using standardized instruments and health insurance data as well as several qualitative studies of aspects of the psychotherapeutic process will be summarized. The studies are diligently designed and the results are well applicable to the conditions of outpatient practice. All the studies show significant improvements not only on the level of symptoms and interpersonal problems, but also on the level of personality structure and in every day life conduct. These improvements remain stable after completion of therapy over a period of up to six years. Several studies show further improvements after the end of therapy, an effect which psychoanalysis has always claimed. Health insurance data show that, after Jungian therapy, patients reduce health care utilization to a level even below the average of the total population. Results of several studies show that Jungian treatment moves patients from a level of severe symptoms to a level where one can speak of psychological health. These significant changes are reached by Jungian therapy with an average of 90 sessions, which makes Jungian psychotherapy an effective and cost-effective method. Process studies support Jungian theories on psychodynamics and elements of change in the therapeutic process. So finally, Jungian psychotherapy has reached the point where it can be called an empirically proven, effective method.

Download PDF Full-Text [230 KB, uploaded 24 October 2013]