Borderline and Narcissistic Conditions

Integrated Child & Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ICAPP)
2021-22, 3rd Block — Mondays, 6:30-7:45pm
Scot Gibson, MD
Kelly Lippman, LMHC

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March 14, 2022

[41 pages]

Kalsched, D. (2013) Dissociation and the Dark Side of the Defensive System: Dante’s Encounter with “Dis” in the Inferno in Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption. New York: Routledge. pp86-126.

Donald Kalsched is a Jungian psychoanalyst. In this chapter he uses Dante’s Inferno to explore how defenses, which we ordinarily think of as self-protective can also trap us in a landscape of our own private “hell.” His use of literature and clinical examples illuminate the tangled connection between unbearable affect and dissociative defenses as well as how unalterable this can seem, clinically.