Trauma

aND TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCE

In a world where trauma has become a common experience it is easy to become despondent. A melancholic tinge permeates consciousness, playing a sad fiddlers lament in the background. Traumatic experience, sometimes acute, sometimes chronic, sometimes vicarious, shows its presence in every person’s life. Trauma shapes the person you are, leaving with some...

a feeling of being caught in the liminal space between life and death. Neither dead nor alive, our internal world resembles the affect and creativity of the walking dead zombies. Could traumatic experience lead to transformation rather than leave us stuck in this liminal space?

“I feel especially drawn by this unfinished house, for I believe it needs an additional room that will reconcile the spirit of the depths with the clinical demands of the spirit of the times.”(3). 

 Jung’s own experience of transformation through traumatic experience as detailed in The Red Book (1) forms an instructive experience that shows trauma as a transcendent experience which expands consciousness and psychic depth. Healing for Jung was not just an allopathic fixing of pathology, but also a homeopathic healing of the entire soul through engagement with  the unconscious and the process of individuation (growth towards wholeness). 

Trauma opens the suspended liminal space which could transform the way we experience death, life and loss, and the ego and Self. A therapeutic relationship becomes a safe space where unexpressed thoughts, feelings and parts of our psyches cut off from consciousness by the traumatic experience becomes open to exploration and expression. As Wilfred Bion described, we are able to “re-member” ourselves. We are able to creates a safe room between the two worlds of self-expression and self-defence. 

Through the decent into darkness and suffering of our repressed psyche there is hope and life. Through the transcendent experience within the containing relationship with our therapist we can engage life affirming, healing parts of our archetypal based psyches to enrich our lives through traumatic experiences. 

Post by Konrad van Staden, Jungian Analyst and Clinical Psychologist. 

(1)Jung, C. G., & Shamdasani, S. (Ed.). (2009). The Red Book: Liber novus. (M. Kyburz & J. Peck, Trans.). W W Norton & Co.

(2) Bion, W. R., Attention and Interpretation. (1984). London: Tavistock Publications: London: Karnac Books

(3) Wirtz, Ursula. Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation. (2021). (p. 17).Routledge: New York. 

 

 

Back