Presented by
The Society of Analytical Psychology
The perspective of trauma has often been tragically (and scandalously) lost from psychoanalytic thinking and practice, or at least given only token recognition. The innovations in the understanding of trauma in the last two decades have been slow to be integrated with analytic theory, and a split has often developed between analytic and trauma-based ways of working.
In this talk I will outline an approach which puts early traumatic experience as central to analytic work, and will introduce a developed conceptualisation of Jung’s concept of the complex, which embodies trauma-related internal working models and primitive responses to the trauma itself. I will suggest that this perspective sheds new light on traditional analytic difficulties, for example, borderline states of mind, and will outline the subtle but far-reaching shifts in analytic understanding that this entails.
