Source: Donald Kalsched on Psyche’s Self Care System and the Partial Cure Paradox
I want to reference some of Donald Kalsched’s writing (“Working with Trauma in Analysis,” by Donald E. Kalsched, PP. 281-295, from Jungian Psychoanalysis: Working In The Spirit of C.G. Jung, Edited by Murray Stein).
“For those familiar with attachment theory, the SCS (see psyche’s “self care system”) can be thought of as a set of internal working models or schemas reflecting patterns of relationships that have been generalized and internalized (Stern 1985, Knox 2003, 104-37). These schemas provide a set of appraisals and expectancies about outer relationships that determine how the interpersonal world is interpreted and experienced. From a Jungian standpoint, however, the SCS is much more than an internalization of outer relationship-patterns. Its imagery and affects are amplified from within by the psyche’s mythopoetic, archetypal dynamism, and the apparent “wisdom” with which it generates meaning, creates imaginative stories for the “child” and provides healing dreams, would seem to transcend what is often described as infantile illusion or defensive fantasy. More than one clinician has been deeply moved by the uncanny inner intelligence that seems to be mobilized under conditions of traumatic stress-to the point of suggesting that in its efforts to heal trauma, the psyche seems to have access to “higher,” precognitive or trans-rational powers (Ferenczi 1988, 81, Jung 1912, 330, Bernstein, 2005).
However we visualize it, the SCS accomplishes a partial cure of trauma, enough so that life continues, despite dissociation and its effects in limiting a person’s full potential. When people come for psychoanalysis they often don’t know that this partial cure is in place, nor do they expect that their identities, informed for many years by “interpretations” from the SCS, will have to be “deconstructed” in the course of therapy. As Masud Khan (1974) reminds us, with these traumatically wounded individuals . . . “one is rarely dealing, at first, with the authentic illness of the patient. [Rather] . . . what is most difficult to resolve and cure is the patient’s practice of self-cure. To cure a cure is the paradox that faces us in these patients . . .” (97). (Chuck’s italics)
May we work together to cure the cure,
chuck
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