Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption

My psychotherapist recommended this book. It is one of the most profound books I have ever read.

I absolutely love this book! Really makes you think outside the box if you are just the clinical approach to cognitive functioning, if you are like many folks out there who know that in order to achieve balance, you have to have all areas addressed, physical, mental, emotional AND SPIRITUAL. This book is fantastic.

As a survivor of early trauma, this is the only book that I have ever read that relates to me at a depth or analytical psychology level. It is a very advanced understanding of the mind of those traumatised and the self care system we (or some of us) developed. I quote from page 52:"It seems that the process of becoming the self you were intended to be (Jung’s definition of individuation) involves the materialisation of something spiritual.Some seed of true self-hood needs to make a perilous journey through very dangerous territory from the world of eternity to the world of time, from spirit to matter, from divine to human, in order to become a human soul.Along the way this ‘seed’ will face many trials and suffer great disillusionment and it may never be able to make a full commitment to this hopeful journey if its suffering into reality is too great. It may even be forced to split into two, sending part of itself back into the imperishable world from which it came, to make sure that the soul is not annihilated.Sometimes it will be able to return from this dissociation and enter life again. Along the way glimpses of the ‘light’ of its origins and its true companion may support it in its suffering, And if, through all the brokenness of the human condition, it finds enough of those sunny days when life seems possible, enough of those resonant images, empathic self-objects (Kohut) and optimal sufferings (Winnicott) that make love worth the sacrifice of omnipotence…if it makes it to these shores with some of its original identify intact and not as a false self…then in the language of T. S. Eliot it will have “arrived where it started, and know the place for the first time.”There is nothing further that I can say that will add to the above quote, but I hope this will give you an understanding of this simply amazing book (life time work of the author)

Donald Kalshed may not be a prolific writer but the quality of his writing and the enormous addition that he makes in the psychotherapeutic and psychological understanding is phenomenal. Kalshed is not only interested in analysis but combines knowledge and meaning through the narrative of symbolism.I am deeply indebted to his book and to him for putting into clear wording what I had experienced in expansion of consciousness while working with the Unconscious

Thanks for getting this book to me.