An emblematic world of trauma therapy

The Symbolic Dimension of Trauma Therapy

This paper explores Jung’s concept of the “symbolic attitude,” a notion he defines as: “a certain view of the world that bestows meaning upon events… and attributes to this meaning a greater value than to bare facts.”^[i] I would like to examine the deeper implications of how the symbolic can be applied in working with people who have experienced trauma.

Symbolic messages and myth open the gates of the unconscious psyche, create reality, and provide a sense of context and purpose. In a letter to Freud written in 1909, Jung expresses his understanding that without mythology it is impossible to unravel the “basic mysteries of neuroses and psychoses.”^[ii] The language of symbols and myth as the “primordial language of the psyche”^[iii] is especially necessary when working with traumatized individuals. The inherently fragmented nature of their traumatic experiences, their discontinuity and irrational, non-linear quality invite our consciousness to go beyond the factual and demand a symbolic, imaginative approach to this descent into Hades with its primitive and chthonic powers.

For Jung, the recognition of the power of the symbolic viewpoint leads to “living the symbolic life,” an attitude he considered necessary for the formation of meaning and orientation. Jung was deeply convinced that only the symbolic life can satisfy the needs of the soul. He firmly believed in the power of the meaning-creating imagination: “Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear.”^[iv]

I want to elaborate on the relevance of symbols, myths, and metaphors for trauma therapy. Since the inner world of the traumatized person suffers from fragmentation and destruction, imagination and fantasy are extremely important for healing this split and creating one's own myth in order to integrate traumatic experience. Kalsched noted that both Freud and Jung encountered difficulties working with the “‘mythopoetic’ fantasy images that the psyche throws off in the aftermath of trauma.”^[v]

When seized by the archetypal power of trauma, wounded by the shattering of meaning and values, a symbolic framework is needed to voice what cannot be expressed in rational discourse. Traumatized individuals need to actively engage imagination and fantasy to overcome the fixation of obsessive, repetitive, indelible images and haunting bodily sensations. Traumatic memories, as described by Judith Herman,^[vi] are often characterized by a lack of verbal narrative and context, instead being encoded in a stream of sensations and images. Traumatic dreams, such as nightmares, have a fragmentary character without figurative elaboration. Working with the symbolic, engaging in fantasies, and using metaphor as a matrix and bridge facilitate the processing of affects and emotions and allow clients to restore their damaged capacity to symbolize. Metaphors allow us to talk about traumatic experience that cannot be described literally. Creative metaphorical construction encourages the symbolization of psychic material; metaphors have an integrative quality, giving form to cognitive processes and representing possible solutions to intolerable conflicts through a new framework. This property of metaphor to facilitate the translation of affect into language makes its use in trauma therapy indispensable.

The use of metaphor and the symbolic point of view in the development of psychoanalytic theory and analytic thinking has a long history.^[vii] Freud is well known for his masterful use of metaphors; in fact, he believed that we can only speak about the psyche by using metaphors. The psyche speaks in images, and it is through metaphors and symbols that we connect with the soul. We also encounter the theme of the subject's connection to the symbolic as a central theme in contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly in Lacanian thought. For Lacan, psychoanalysts are essentially “practitioners of the symbolic function.”^[viii] His concept of the “symbolic” and the imaginary order, which structures human existence, has greatly influenced contemporary psychoanalytic heuristics. Modern and postmodern theories of the imagination (Heidegger, Ricoeur, Kristeva) show how insightful Jung's contribution to our understanding of the role of the imagination was, even though his contribution is completely ignored. Within contemporary psychoanalytic heuristics, Lachauer emphasizes the integrative function of metaphor and imagery for focal therapy and asserts in his article: “You shall create an image,”^[ix] alluding to the biblical commandment that forbids depicting God. He refers to modern brain research, where the brain is considered an image-generating organ and life a process of generating images. This primacy of the image can already be found in Hegel, and going even further back, to the Gospel of John, we could translate “In the beginning was the word” as language being an act of symbolization, “in the beginning was the symbol.”

Our thought processes are structured by the metaphors that underlie them; thought and symbol originate from bodily experience. Jung asserts: “Thus the symbol is a living body, corpus et anima.”^[x] Traumatic experiences disrupt the connection between body and mind, spirit and instincts, resulting in a severe impairment of the function of creating symbolic meaning, and people lose their sense of aliveness, playfulness, and imagination.

Since, in the Jungian understanding, the transformation of the psyche occurs through its inherent unconscious and autonomous symbolic power, the analytic task in working with trauma cases is to facilitate building the capacity to symbolize the trauma and its various meanings. We need to restore the connection to this bodily basis of meaning and imagination, which plays such an important role in the analytic space of imagination between analyst and client. Gustav Bovensiepen describes how the symbolic attitude and symbol formation can be used within the transference-countertransference framework to develop symbolic space; for him, “analysis in its totality is a symbolic space par excellence.”^[xi]

Jung called the psychological function of symbol formation the transcendent function – a natural, goal-directed, and prospective process that arises from the tension of opposites and manifests as energy in our dreams and visions.^[xii] This relational dynamic of integration is a process of meaning formation on the path of individuation, a process that can also be translated in attachment theory terms as “appraisal,” the constant evaluation of the world necessary for survival and, therefore, particularly relevant for those who have experienced trauma. The psyche is engaged in a constant process of interpreting and reinterpreting implicit and explicit patterns of symbols and images. Jean Knox^[xiii] shows how meaningful experience depends on the transcendent function, a process that compares and integrates internal objects and the “self,” explicit and implicit knowledge, the left and right brain, cognition and emotion.

The conceptualization of the “transcendent function,” manifesting as the opposition of united opposites, provides a healing pattern that offers containment and order in the chaotic and confused unconscious psychic state.

Although symbol creation is considered a natural activity, we see that the ability to symbolize in traumatized individuals is often severely impaired. It is as if trauma undermines the transcendent function, even though Jung formulated this concept of the symbol and the functioning of the transcendent function while he himself was in a state of extreme crisis.^[xiv]

The Integrating Power of Symbols

The word “symbol” comes from the Greek “symbolon,” meaning a token of identity.^[xv] In ancient Greece, two friends parting from each other performed a ritual: they broke a clay tablet into two pieces, one for each. Anyone who could later produce the missing half, whether the friend himself or a member of his family, had the right to be accepted as a friend. This clay tablet was visible proof of the soul's connection between friends. The etymological background points to a very important property of symbols: the symbol unites, it creates a bond, and this creates duality. The symbol is always relational, and symbolization is an act of translation that facilitates the creation of new connections. The Greek verb “sym-ballein” means to join, to unite. It is what joins two halves together, connects opposing forces, and even offers something more that cannot be named or grasped, as it extends beyond language. Jung emphasizes this reconciling function of the symbol, its mediating power that unites people with each other and with what lies beyond.

The symbolic offers a holistic approach to the spiritual problems of our patients because the symbol “points beyond itself to a meaning that is dimly divined.”^[xvi] Symbols reveal the dualism of all existence, yet they also reconnect the poles with each other, building bridges between the conscious and the unconscious. They challenge boundaries, throw bridges between opposites and reconcile them, while simultaneously revealing and concealing, organizing chaotic experience into meaningful structures and a kind of order.

The ability of symbols to provide inner orientation has proven particularly valuable in the psychotherapy of people who have been shocked and shattered by traumatic events. Great distress is always an experience of separation, whereas the symbolic dimension unites. That is why it heals.

This function of the symbol is desperately needed in trauma therapy, where we must create a safe symbolic space in which the depth of traumatic experience can be unfolded and the nameless horror of emptiness and the abyss, the archetypal experience of abandonment and betrayal, can be symbolized. This ability of symbols to bind and connect dissociated fragments helps us overcome the dissociation caused by traumatic splitting.

Symbols are “pregnant with meaning.” They belong to our original, archaic, human language. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm stated: “Symbolic language is the only foreign language that each of us must learn.”^[xvii] Symbols bridge the visible and the invisible and point the way to a hidden reality that we perceive as meaningful. Emerging from the fertile ground of the unconscious, they bring us into contact with a deeper layer of being, with the fundamental source of our collective ground. Symbols link external objects and events with inner psychic reality, and they grasp more than the cold intellect can understand – a wisdom already conveyed to us by Shakespeare. As pointers, they represent a broader frame of reference, connecting us with the oldest layers of the human mind and mediating between the rational and the irrational. Edward C. Whitmont in “The Alchemy of Healing”^[xviii] counts symbols among “the most powerful transmitters of energy, capable of moving mountains.” As transformers of libido and manifestations of archetypal activity with a powerful capacity to release and transform, they enhance our awareness.

Symbols as messages of wholeness arise from the creative potential of the psyche and help us move beyond our state of isolation and alienation. The power of symbols is connected to this spiritual striving for wholeness. Working with symbols and myth-making is a powerful tool for achieving psychological integration, bringing fragmented parts of the self “home,” and helping to achieve a greater sense of life's continuity.^[xix]

We create symbols to reproduce ourselves, to see meaning and make sense of the confusing multiplicity of the world. Symbols point to something new. They have a prospective, goal-oriented function, moving us forward and making us insightful for the other, the ultimate, the numinous, which we are unable to grasp with our limited consciousness. I agree with George B. Hogenson when he writes: “the process of change in analysis is always oriented to the transcendent nature of the symbolic.”^[xx]

The message of symbols, pictures, and dreams is always one step ahead of us. They crystallize the focus of our future psychic development in an image or metaphor. When we are at an impasse, frozen and petrified, when we can move neither forward nor backward, the unexpected appearance of a symbol can save us, restarting the psychic process.

At those very points where the physical and psychic foundations of our existence have been most damaged and where our psychic landscape is dominated by a sense of being cut off from the rest of the world, symbols can appear with particular poignancy to shed light, as if through a crack, into this prevailing desolation. When trauma occurs and the ground gives way beneath our feet, we lose connection with our own center and fall into an altered state of consciousness that accelerates the symbolic search with a deep spiritual foundation.

The Symbol of the Path-Labyrinth

The labyrinth is an ancient image of order, combining the images of the circle and the spiral of the winding path. This closely resembles the non-linear, spiral dynamics we encounter in working with trauma survivors. It is a symbol of tension and dynamic movement, a metaphor pointing to a complex, confusing situation. Similar to analysis, this journey constantly approaches the desired center, only for us to move away again from where we would like to go. For me, the symbol of the labyrinth represents a model of the flow of psychic energy and analytic work. It is a centered, non-linear process where the fear of a dead-end situation, an impasse, as well as the fear of being captured by something greater than the ego, something uncontrollable, constantly lurks. But there is also the hope of empowerment after reconnecting with the energetic center, the inner sanctuary. I see the labyrinth as a symbol of the soul's path to transformation. The individuation process of the traumatized person resembles the winding, spiral journey Jung described: “The way to the goal seems chaotic and uncertain at first, and only gradually do signs emerge that it is leading somewhere. This path is not straight; it appears to be going in circles. Deeper study indicates that it is a spiral.”^[xxi]

The Archetypal Ground of Trauma

Trauma reaches the archetypal level of consciousness, where the symbolic dimension and imagination-based approaches become central to the healing process. Traumatic experience activates archaic levels of our psyche and constellates an archetypal landscape, highly charged with affect.

Trauma is existence in extremis, it is a “destroyer of meaning,” but also potentially a catalyst for a new orientation in life. I view such destruction in the context of life's development, just as I imagine individuation as a sequence of deaths and renewals, where disintegration and destruction become opportunities for new creation.

Trauma is conceptualized in many ways. Traumatic life events cannot be assimilated by the victim's internal schemas regarding self-perception and the world (Horowitz);^[xxii] they shatter the victim's fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self (Janoff-Bulman)^[xxiii] and cause affective disturbance. Krystal believed that trauma induces a regression to affect, an impoverishment and deficit in the capacity for symbolic representation and fantasy formation.^[xxiv] Winnicott points to the need for a good “holding environment”^[xxv] to cope with the anxiety of disintegration caused by traumatic events, and Kohut^[xxvi] refers to the fragmentation of the coherent self. Kalsched^[xxvii] shows how trauma ruptures the transitional processes of human relationship that generate meaning.

The experience of archetypal suffering inspires the use of religious and mythological language to convey the unspeakable. We rely on myth to describe what is essentially indescribable. We call trauma an experience of “hell,” “God in exile,” a terrifying encounter with the dark side of God, with the “Deus Absconditus,” who reveals “the heavens as an abyss” (Celan) and causes the archetypal experience of exile and abandonment. We symbolize trauma as the “yawning abyss,” the “black hole” (van der Kolk, Farleyne) and the “void” (Krystal), an experience of “anti-creation” (Primo Levi), the interruption of the “thread of life” (Asper), the formation of an “ego tear” and a fissure in the psyche. Trauma victims suffer from a disruption of human relationship, from “the broken connection,” as Robert Jay Lifton called this feeling of alienation,^[xxviii] a state of “being outside culture.” He believed that trauma disrupts the ability to form images and symbolic forms that provide a sense of continuity, and he states the necessity of transforming and rebirthing these symbols in the search for new meaning.

This archetypal dimension of trauma has the character of the “numinous” (R. Otto), a mesmerizing power to destroy, as well as the ability and power to give life and renew. When our worldview disintegrates, and our entire way of being shatters, the doors of the ego prison can swing open. This archetypal limit-experience of the indescribable black hole can open up to dimensions of wholeness, transformation of consciousness, and individuation. When trauma occurs, our perception of self and world is radically reorganized. The meaning of the word “catastrophe” in ancient Greek is a turning point, and it is at this turning point that enantiodromia (Heraclitus) can emerge. In dynamic systems theory, phase transitions occur when the level of “symbolic density” increases – a concept developed by Jungian analyst George Hogenson.^[xxix] Trauma research refers to the transformative power of trauma as “post-traumatic growth,” a new paradigm that describes the process of change in the areas of self-perception, interpersonal relationships, and life philosophy and spirituality. The wounding and suffering in traumatic states can be a gateway to the numinous, often experienced as a “dark night of the soul,” calling for transformation and growth and, perhaps, leading to “the dark light of the soul.”^[xxx] The traumatic experience of our own worthlessness and the ego's insignificance is one such numinous experience.

The archetypal aspects of traumatic experience are connected to the transpersonal dimension, where questions of meaning and the need to accept the paradoxes of human life are at stake. The symbolic attitude is most important for traumatized individuals, as it reconnects the person with something beyond them; it restores the broken connection and facilitates a change of attitude, metanoia.

Working with the Imaginal Realm

Trauma therapy deals with liminal states where Hermes reigns. This creates a very specific interactive energy field,^[xxxi] where the analyst's somatic unconscious is stimulated. I apply a method of working with the imagination, using metaphorical images and drawing on an attitude of intuitive receptivity. This creates a space free from value judgments and open to the emergence of possibilities. It fosters growth and movement toward change. I try to embody a receptive state of awareness, an ability to wait and tune into “archetypal frequencies” to better understand the interactive field in which we move. Murray Stein states: “The interactive field lies between the field of the collective unconscious and the sphere of subjectivity, encompassing both at the same time.”^[xxxii]

The healing quality of this interactive field was described by Jung. Following his premonitions and listening to something within himself, he was quite unsure about rational interventions, but then he also arrived at an irrational, instinctive response that was healing, such as singing a lullaby in a mother's voice to a girl suffering from insomnia. The mysterious healing power of images, words, and songs allows the unconscious to break through and prompt the individual to change their conscious attitude.

To attune to the silence and body language of my traumatized patients, I need to allow myself to enter a state of analytic reverie and metaphor, a dream-like state that Bion pointed to with his concept of “Reverie.”^[xxxiii] As I listen carefully to my own experience of resonance, I can use the inner images and metaphors that arise in me from the shared imaginal realm to mirror and order the patient's experience, reframe the story, and transform often chaotic, archaic material into conceptual thinking. My own inner images can point to the patient's potential, their resources and strengths. Through co-creation, we develop a symbolic approach that allows us to access hidden creative possibilities and nourishes the process of consciousness growth. Compassionate entry into the patient's pain, rather than the desire to cure it, requires shared suffering and mourning for what cannot be mended.

The reliable presence of the therapist provides a symbolic space where containment can be felt. In such a “facilitative space” of analysis, which is an “incubation chamber” or “alchemical vessel,” mutuality is felt, and traumatic, emotionally charged images can be safely embodied, and the archetypal healing power is constellated. When I am fully engaged with my traumatized patients, a space of creativity unfolds between us, and reciprocal healing images arise in me as part of our shared fantasy and intuitive dialogue. Through this subtle exchange, previously blocked areas of experience are brought back to life, and access to resources emerges. Metaphorical amplifications of the story, mutual transmission of moods, and mutual mirroring of feelings are components of the process of identity formation.

Of course, when working with the imaginal realm, it is extremely important to assess the strength of the ego in order to use the right interventions and prevent the compulsive flow of emotional images, the blurring of boundaries, and inappropriate states of fusion.

The transference-countertransference process can be seen as a dialectical relationship, changes within which do not occur according to a fixed program, but in a dynamic, systemic, co-determined process of responsive interaction or “co-evolution.” Jung's idea that the cure is a product of mutual influence applies particularly to the relationships we must establish in trauma therapy: “The meeting of two personalities is like the mixing of two chemical compounds. If they mix at all, both are changed.”^[xxxiv] The same idea is expressed by Balint when he refers to “harmonious (or disharmonious) interpenetrating mixing.”^[xxxv] Balint also emphasizes the value of “entering” into the patient's suffering as a primary factor in healing. Responsive soothing implies a reliable groundedness of the analyst, as trauma can be of a poisonous, contagious nature. The therapist must beware of “psychic infection,” meaning literally taking on the patient's suffering, as Jung postulated.^[xxxvi] Whitmont describes such deliberate identification with the patient's state as “a vicarious self-sacrifice through conscious empathic ‘co-suffering.’ One's own wounds resonate with the client's wounds in the mutual inductive influences of the therapeutic relationship.”^[xxxvii]

Listening with the Third Ear

I believe a particular way of listening is required, different from Freud’s “evenly suspended attention,” listening with the third ear, as described by Theodor Reik.^[xxxviii] It works in two ways: it picks up what patients do not say, but only feel and think, and at the same time, this listening is turned inward. In this mode, the therapist listens to the inner voice, a kind of prospective listening to what seeks to be born. Such listening creates a healing environment in which being means acting. Jungian analyst Kathryn Asper speaks of the “maternal attitude” needed when working with severely wounded patients. Like a mother who empathically perceives the unspoken, we need to adopt a type of affective attunement that fosters growth and can meet needs that are not yet articulate.

Listening to people who have been tortured is like listening to voices from the underworld, the land of no return. When I encountered tortured prisoners of war who had survived the camps of Omarska, Manjaca, and Batkovici, I recalled the mythical underworld, where one is alive but deprived of life. They were dead to the world. Although they looked like living people, their whole existence had evaporated. “We only look as if we are alive,” they said when I interviewed them a few days after their release from the camps, “But the truth is, we are dead.” Encountering people whose symbols and values have been destroyed by torture and violence, we are left with the feeling that these are people walking as if dead in the midst of life. If the symbolic function is destroyed, they no longer have any living connection to their own psychic creativity. This is because symbols activate libido and, ultimately, give life meaning.

Perhaps we need to combine our third ear listening with cultivating a certain way of seeing with the third eye, a deeper seeing that Hillman proposed as “seeing through” from the imaginal angle: “This is what depth psychology has always insisted upon: to look at conscious events and intentions from the unconscious, from below.”^[xxxix]

I remain attentive to archetypal images that may arise in me in response to what I hear. Sometimes the image of the phoenix appears, the mythological symbol of the renewal process, as this bird burns on the pyre and then rises from the ashes; sometimes it is Leviathan, the embodied monster of Chaos, dwelling in the ocean depths and capable of swallowing even the sun. Faced with a chronic state of traumatic fixation, I may feel the person as having been swallowed by Leviathan. While working with survivors, myths of Osiris and Dionysus, images from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” narratives of life in hell shift within my mind.

Through myths, we are familiar with the processes of dismemberment and dissolution or disintegration that lead more to expansion than to constriction of consciousness, to the search for rather than the loss of meaning, to love rather than hate. As I enter the chambers of evil, these stories of the underworld accompany me from within, and the “consolations” of Stoic philosophical therapy help me do my work in the archetypal field of death and renewal.

Working with traumatized people challenges my capacity to act as a container, allowing somatic transference and countertransference symptoms to emerge. I need to attune to what cannot yet be told, to the unknown that may emerge in my own inner space through incoherent, fragmented images and a flood of bodily sensations. The dreams and images of clients unconsciously evoke my own unconscious reactions, and the archetypal pattern within me responds to what is constellated in the interactive field between us.

Through supportive containment and holding, empathically attuned resonance, and bridge-building in a reflective stance, I try to reconnect these patients with their own capacity to symbolize through active imagination, art, sandplay, and fantasy. Our movement is often a dance around the pattern of death and rebirth as the fundamental archetypal theme in the process of trauma transformation. These mythical patterns connect traumatized patients with their pressing existential issues, thus creating a sense of connection, healing the feeling of being “outside culture.”

Working integratively and considering helpful approaches from related fields, I weave the therapeutic process, exploring systems of religious symbols, symbols of myths, and fairy tales about our ancient human confrontation with the mysteries of life and death, destruction and renewal, dismemberment and recreation. I think of Ovid and Heraclitus with their firm belief in change and transformation, that nothing visible retains its form and nature, that everything transforming always creates new forms from the old.

The dynamic development of the symbol facilitates adaptability and better processes of self-regulation and meaning-making. The trauma therapy process can be seen as a kind of emergence from darkness, deep pain, suffering, and a distorted state of consciousness to a state in which transformation occurs with a more true and accurate vision of oneself and the world. Lisa McCann and Laurie A. Pearlman refer to the allegory of Plato’s cave, describing this as “…the gradual process of accommodation as one moves from blindness to glimpsing a new reality.”^[xl] The wounds need healing and working through after the ego has been forced to give up its central position.

Working with Drawings and Guided Imagery

Images touch us more deeply than words. Traumatic images typically consist of distressing memories and fragmented vivid images that represent symbolic manifestations of traumatic memory. The chaotic nature of the emerging images triggers excessive affects that are metaphorically experienced as avalanches, volcanoes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. The transformation of these images and encouraging the patient to create healing images that provide safety is possible through guided imagery – confronting the danger together with imaginary figures and inner helpers, helpful animals, or with the analyst's help. Any creative self-expression, such as drawing, writing poems, fairy tales, or keeping a diary, facilitates the process of seeing oneself beyond the victim position and creating a new identity. Expression through imagery can restore the ability to speak and initiate communication after long periods of dwelling in silent and bottomless abysses. Creating images is a leap forward in the ability to make contact and communicate.

In a drawing, clients can open up and imagine themselves anew as active agents. The value of drawing, like the value of the symbol, lies in its ability to create a new vision of reality. For traumatized people, attempting to depict their suffering in a drawing represents an attempt to overcome the trauma, to transmit and master overwhelming affects, and to restore some power. The process of creating an image can be liberating, endowing the horror of experience with an image without reliving the trauma. This creative process is a working through of the haunting internal representations of traumatic images.

Creating an image is the first step towards re-creating oneself. Drawing implies a relationship – with the brush, with the paint, with the paper. It breaks the client's complete isolation, the state of “the broken connection.” No matter how hopeless its content may seem or in what deep loneliness the image might have been created, every image is a step away from isolation, because the author is aware to some extent that another person may also look at it. Images arise in the perception of relationships, including the relationship between the artist and the image. When we create images, we restructure reality, and thereby, we also restructure ourselves. In symbolic representation, we can reclaim lost or torn-away fragments of our identity.

Just as the trauma itself violated boundaries, so the creation of images in therapy serves the purpose of crossing boundaries and is oriented toward transcendence. The process of symbol creation facilitates self-regulation and integrative processes. It enables an encounter with oneself and entering into a dialogue, as the archetypal content of the image can be integrated into the psyche through intrapsychic communication. Drawing is a creative act in psychotherapy, a leap of imagination in an attempt to create a new identity for oneself. By placing threatening material within the boundaries of the image, we create a sense of safety and distance from it.

I find art therapy approaches particularly useful as they strengthen self-confidence and self-worth, help achieve psychic stability, lead out of states of fragmentation, and initiate integration. By giving form to traumatic material, images make complex inner processes more transparent and activate hidden creative potential, while strengthening healthy aspects of the personality.

I also incorporate receptive art therapy into my therapeutic work with traumatized clients. Paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Goya, Picasso, Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, and Frida Kahlo help me symbolize dismemberment, fragmentation, violence, and psychic splitting. I facilitate many diverse ways of expression and creation, as I described in my book “Seelenmord. Inzest und Therapie” (Soul Murder. Incest and Therapy).^[xli]

Often significant dreams of the kind Jung called “big dreams,” which may be full of demonic horror or enigmatic wisdom,^[xlii] reveal the transformative energy of the collective unconscious breaking through in traumatic states. Through the encounter with the dragon, the devil, the Minotaur, hidden treasures, or the wise black woman, the numinous embedded in our own psyche is symbolized. Depending on the strength of the ego and the phase of trauma therapy, engaging in active imagination to interact with these figures can be a way to explore the unknown and uncover the meaning hidden in these images.

The Relevance of Rituals

Rituals are inherent in human nature and reflect the autonomous activity of the objective psyche. They have always been used to navigate the critical stages of life. Focusing on the mystery of life, they touch upon the intersection of ego and self. Rituals help to quiet the mind, console the soul, and heal the heart. In trauma therapy, they serve as a container for powerful emotions and archetypal forces, act as mediators between consciousness and the unconscious, facilitating the emergence of the transcendent function. The healing energy of sand pictures, as in sandplay, makes raw traumatic experience more amenable to integration. They symbolize the need to defend, protect, and create a safe temenos, as well as to enact processes of death and rebirth. Creating rituals of letting go and mourning also releases energy and is an important step in the healing process.

Recognizing that imagination stimulates more areas of the brain than words alone, trauma therapists focus on various hypno-projective techniques that help stabilize, control, and regulate this process. These are well-known screening methods, such as the imaginary video, the safe place, the treasure or treasure chest for storing traumatic material, or the inner team and inner helpers that help master intrusive images. Analysis is a symbolic healing ritual, where traumatic wounds become bearable and less painful. We need to clean the wound, care for it, remove the dirt, bandage it, and give it time to heal.

Myth and Narrative Identity in Trauma Therapy

Identity is an unfolding narrative in which the past is reconstructed, the present is perceived and described, and the future is anticipated. A meaningful living myth consists of the elements that shape a person's life. The concept of “narrative identity” goes back to Paul Ricoeur^[xliii] and refers to the stories people tell about themselves to define who they are.

Identity is something dynamic; it provides individuality and continuity and creates a meaningful whole. This is why, after trauma, “biographical work,” that is, processing the trauma by telling its story and creating a coherent personal myth that leaves room for ambiguity and paradox, is a way of reconstructing one's identity and understanding oneself. There is an archetypal need to tell our story and restore our dignity after the traumatic experience of fragmentation, sometimes a kind of compulsion to bear witness.

Storytelling in narrative psychology is a way of “self-making and world-making,”^[xliv] an attempt to reconstruct a coherent sense of self by transforming life into narrative. Narrative functions to shape and frame the chaos of trauma. Analysis works with these healing narratives to structure subjective experience and facilitate a dialogue between conscious and unconscious material. The trauma narrative can be seen as an odyssey of the self, an attempt at self-creation. Traumatized people seek a new concept of themselves, and hence a new myth, one that accounts for the trauma they have experienced and attempts to decipher the pattern and meaning of these events.

Jung was well aware of the mythical nature of personal experience and repeatedly stated that he felt a desire to know his own myth.

In the ritual of analysis, the trauma story is re-envisioned again and again, meaning is attributed, behavior is explained and justified, and broken connections are restored. In this process, the client gradually regains control and thaws out. These stories are told from different points of view, in words and images, to develop meaning, enhance coherence, and clarify direction. They are always changing in the course of analysis; they are as fluid and unstable as the concept of identity itself. Just as individuation is an ongoing process, there is also an ongoing process of appropriating meaning from the trauma experienced.

The evolutionary success of the human race is based on its ability to adapt to adverse life conditions, to be flexible and create new options for thinking and behaving. Trauma survivors must transform and re-create themselves. They must establish themselves as an “identity-in-progress.” When a person experiences a traumatic shock, when the world as they imagined it shatters, when the ego loses its guiding function, the person is forced to reconstruct and recompose their identity to restore a sense of coherence. Reformatting traumatic experience into a story is a creative coping, because in this way the narrator gains control over the traumatic event, at least retrospectively. Trauma narratives are, in a sense, ways of reclaiming something lost and trying to figure out how personal fate fits into the scheme of things.

Imagination-based trauma stories tell of how clients emotionally coped with the destruction of their belief systems and worldviews and how they ultimately worked through their personal experience in terms of a more collective and even spiritual perspective. In analysis, this personal myth is elaborated in archetypal, symbolic language, the language of the imagination. The new paradigm of trauma therapy known as “post-traumatic growth” points to how personal and collective myths are created after the experience of suffering, which also reflects the person's relationship with the transpersonal dimension of human existence, provoked by traumatic experience. The experience of torture, for example, made people reflect on what they were willing to suffer or even die for. In other words, they are forced to deal with a question of “ultimate concern” – a concept developed by theologian Paul Tillich.^[xlv] The numinosity of trauma can either force the survivor into contact with these ultimate concerns, which can only be expressed symbolically, or the traumatic experience can lead to the loss of any ultimate concern and throw the person into existential anxiety or complete meaninglessness. We must help our clients tap into the capacity for renewal by applying symbolic and imaginative consciousness to decipher the mythical dimension of what happened to them. We help them understand how their traumatic experience has shaped their awareness of the ultimate questions of their lives, their values, their worldview, and their connection to the infinite.

In my practice working with victims of torture, sexual abuse, and war trauma, I listen attentively to the archetypal patterns that emerge in stories about violence. In extreme situations, where the client is most vulnerable, archetypal patterns and dynamics are most likely to break through and take over the creation of a sense of identity and meaning. Roesler^[xlvi] observed that in traumatic situations, when the ego is most vulnerable, the psyche seeks its new orientation in basic archetypal patterns. Ways of experiencing, patterns of behavior, and narrative styles emerge in the stories that can be compared to myths, fairy tales, works of art, and poetry. In these narratives of the self-in-the-making, personal and archetypal patterns are mixed. Paying special attention to how these stories are constructed as blueprints for future life and the meaning attributed to the traumatic event, what role the traumatic event is assigned in relation to the person's perception of life and their interpretation of themselves and the world, helps identify the underlying archetypal pattern that unconsciously casts the traumatized person in the role of victim or hero, as well as guides the individuation process.

Richard Stromer^[xlvii] in his work on personal mythology as a pathway to the sacred refers to Pieracci,^[xlviii] who introduced the term “ontic myth” to denote the set of beliefs about what one must be in this world, what people are like or should be like to avoid a repetition of the trauma. There is an interdependent link between how experience shapes myth-making and how myth shapes subsequent experience. Listening to such “ontic myths,” I focus on the archetypal patterns and combinations of symbols that appear in the images, and I identify the person's resources and certain protective factors. I am guided by the following questions: How does the traumatized person describe the struggle to survive after trauma? What patterns are brought into play from the treasury of archetypal wisdom, myths, religions, literature, cinema, and music to find/provide meanings? What can I learn about the “miracle” of healing and rescue, about the wounded person and wounded healer archetype, about victims and perpetrators, about the child and hero archetype, about surrender and sacrifice? The way people manage to move beyond their traumatic experience demonstrates the self's capacity for meaning-making.

Stages of the Symbolic Path

In trauma therapy, we usually distinguish different stages of healing. First and foremost, safety and stabilization are important. We must create a temenos with clear boundaries and structure. This creates an atmosphere of compassion and solidarity. We must strengthen the capacity to bear painful emotions associated with intrusive images and slowly accompany our patients on their circuitous descent into the underworld. As an analyst, I provide the connection between these two worlds, that Ariadne's thread that holds the “broken connection” of the wounded person who has descended into the realm of the dead. Timing and pacing, as well as patience and perseverance, are extremely important here. I look at the myths of Demeter and Persephone or Inanna as images of the healing process. In the therapeutic process, there are times when the wounded person returns again and again to the underworld, to moments when they feel dead. I need to trust the process, as this constant dying countless deaths is a necessary stage of such a path of rebirth.

In the second stage of healing, I help the patient confront the traumatic core and symbolize it using guided imagery. Exploring the imagistic memory system is a very powerful affective experience that needs to be carefully planned and prepared. Sufficient inner strength to endure the often deeply horrifying images, as well as the capacity for self-soothing, are prerequisites for this stage. Mourning the losses, as in the case of Demeter, is a very important step in this stage. With the help of dreams and active imagination, I support the process of weaving a new life myth and encourage its symbolic narrative. Rituals facilitate this process of the rebirth of the self. Entering a state of reverie, I attune to where this person appears to me as most whole, most authentic, most in place, then I encourage the patient to engage in an inner dialogue with this “other being” within. Working with the emerging images and archetypes gradually facilitates the process of symbolization and transformation.

In the third stage of the work, a return from the underworld must take place to rejoin the world of people and face the task of creating the future. This phase is like coming home after a very dangerous journey of working through the self, moving away from the old life and transitioning to a new way of being and relating to oneself and the world. The restoration of lost parts of oneself and the repair of broken connections can feel as if you have finally found a hidden treasure, a spiritual experience that opens new pathways to intimacy and solidarity with others, and often to a new relationship with the numinous. Patients achieve narrative competence and are able to tell their story of wounding, struggle, descent, and return as their own coherent myth. The individuation process forced upon them by traumatic events has helped them become who they are and to know themselves at a very deep level. Some of my traumatized patients would agree with the insights once shared with Jung by a former client: “Evil has given me much good. By keeping silent, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I would like them to be – doing all this, I have gained unusual knowledge as well as unusual power, as I never could have imagined before…”^[xlix]

The task of continuing Jung's work of rescuing the living symbol from destruction is often a slow, painful process of restoring what has been dismembered and reclaiming what has been lost. I am very aware of the limitations I encounter in myself as an analyst doing this work, and the piercing question posed by Rilke in the first “Duino Elegy” rings in my head: “Was it a mission, and could you fulfill it?”^[l] Then I notice the comforting words of Jung echoing in my soul: “Serious life problems… are never solved completely. It seems that the meaning and purpose of the problem lies not in its solution but in our ceaseless work upon it.”^[li]

Accepting these problems with one's whole being is my contribution to this work.

Translation from English: Hanna Stembkovska