Lost and Recovered Innocence in Trauma

Keynote address with Donald Kalsched, PhD, JA

Trauma survivors often lament that they have lost their innocence or lost their souls and

that something vulnerable and whole about themselves has been “broken” or annihilated.

Yet when the psychotherapeutic relationship begins, and symbolic material (including

sandplay and play therapy images) emerges, discernible patterns become apparent,

indicating that a core of innocence and vitality has not been totally lost or annihilated. On

the contrary, it has been “saved” by dissociation and its “Self-Care-System” of archetypal

inner objects and their protective and/or persecutory narrative “scripts” or “schemas.”

The price of such preservation, however, is high, and innocence often comes wrapped in

catastrophic suffering and the powerful dissociative defenses that sequester it. How to

discern this ‘core complex’ and work with its constituent parts—and with the unbearable

suffering around which it is organized–will be the focus of slide-illustrated lectures by both

Don Kalsched and Lorraine Freedle. This material can be useful in clinical work

in sandplay and play therapy and includes theory from a Jungian viewpoint.

Image Credit:  Jelly Freedle

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