The Inner World of Trauma by Kalsched Donald

Author:Kalsched, Donald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317725442
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

It is clear that Haule wants to keep true love, rooted in the “love of God” and the Self, as distinct as possible from daimonic love (contaminated by the shadow). And yet he has to admit that even in daimonic love, there is a power of fascination – even a mysterious promise of transcendence through self-surrender – that mimics “true” romantic love. Both forms of love share in the “numinous” dimension of the psyche. Yet Haule eschews the obvious solution to this dilemma and one very consistent with Jung's writings, namely, that the Self contains the shadow. Instead, he proposes a model of the collective unconscious psyche that describes the “lowest” level of the psyche as a riot of instincts or archetypes (“innate releasing mechanisms”) in disintegrated profusion (the “tiger-pit”), whereas the next layer up is reserved for the synthetic activity of the Self (ibid.: 51). If there is a “flaw” or “wound” in the Self's synthesis, we get a glimpse into the abyss, the disjointed world of chaos from which the daimon-lover beckons. If we should fall into his clutches, regressing morally and otherwise into a hideous shadow of our former selves, then “we know that at least one of the IRM's has broken loose from the Self's synthesis and has taken possession of consciousness” (ibid.: 86).

Using the literary example (from Dostoyevsky's The Insulted and Injured) of a sexually obsessed woman who is a model of propriety on the outside but leads a secret life of sordid sensuality, laughing “like one possessed … in the very heat of voluptuousness,” Haule says:

She is possessed – by one of the inborn releasing mechanisms; she has brought the considerable forces of her well-developed ego into the service of that sexual instinct run amok. We hear in her laugh the painful conflict between the Self and the tiger pit. She has sided with the tigers. For that reason, she is a particularly grotesque example of the demon lover.

(ibid.: 87)

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