The Symbolic Dimension of Trauma therapy

Published in : Symbolic Life ,Spring Journal 2009, Spring vol.82, p.31-52

By Ursula Wirtz

Truth did not come into this world naked; rather it came in prototypes and images.

Gospel of Philip 67: 9-12

This article is concerned with Jung’s concept of the “symbolic attitude,” a concept he defines as: “a definite view of the world which assigns meaning to events…and attaches to this meaning a greater value than bare facts.”ⁱ I want to explore the deeper implications of the way the symbolic can be applied in working with survivors of trauma.

Symbolic messages and myth unlock 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 conveyed his insight that without mythology the “ultimate secrets of neuroses and psychosis” cannot be solved.ⁱⁱ The language of symbols and myth as “the primordial language of psyche”ⁱⁱⁱ is particularly necessary when working with human beings who have been traumatized. The inherently fragmentary character of their traumatic experiences, their discontinuous quality, and non rational and non linear nature invites our consciousness beyond the factual and asks for a symbolic, imaginal approach to this descent into Hades with its primitive and chthonic power.

For Jung the acknowledgement of the power of the symbolic perspective led to “living the symbolic life,” an attitude considered indispensable for giving 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 imagination to make meaning: “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. As the inner world of a traumatized person suffers from fragmentation and fracture, imagination and fantasy are of utmost importance to heal the split and create one’s own myth in order to integrate traumatic experience. Kalsched has pointed out that both Freud and Jung had struggled with “the “mythopoetic” fantasy images that were thrown up by the psyche as the sequel of trauma.”^v

Gripped by the archetypal power of trauma, wounded by the shattering of meaning and values, a symbolic frame is needed to voice what cannot be expressed in rational discourse. Survivors of trauma need to engage actively in imagination and fantasy to overcome fixations of intrusive, repetitive, indelible images and haunting bodily sensations. Traumatic memories are, as Judith Herman^vi described, often characterized by the lack of verbal narrative and context but are encoded in a flood of sensations and images. Traumatic dreams, like nightmares, have a fragmentary character with no imaginative elaboration. Working with the symbolic, engaging in fantasies and using metaphor as a matrix and bridge, fosters the working through of affects and emotions and enables clients to repair their damaged capacity to symbolize. Metaphors provide a way to talk about traumatic experiences that cannot be literally described. Creative metaphoric construction encourages the symbolization of psychic contents; metaphors have an integrative quality, giving form to cognitive processes and presenting possible solutions for unbearable conflicts through a new frame. This quality of metaphor to promote the transition of affect into language makes its use in trauma therapy indispensable.

The use of metaphor and the symbolic perspective in psychoanalytic theory formation and analytic thinking has a long history.^vii Freud is well known for his masterful use of metaphor, in fact he believed that to speak about the psyche one could only use metaphors. The psyche speaks in images and it is through metaphor and symbols that we connect to the soul. We encounter the subject’s relationship with the symbolic also as a central theme in modern psychoanalysis, particularly in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, psychoanalysts are essentially “practitioners of the symbolic function.”^viii His concept of the “symbolic order” and the imaginary order that structures human existence have been very influential in modern psychoanalytic heuristics. Modern and postmodern theories of imagination (Heidegger, Ricoeur, Kristeva) show how visionary Jung’s contribution to our understanding of the role of imagination has been although his contribution has been totally overlooked. Within contemporary psychoanalytic heuristics, Lachauer emphasizes the integrative function of metaphor and images for focal therapy and asserts in his article, “You should make a picture,”^ix alluding to the Biblical commandment forbidding images of God. He refers to modern brain research where the brain is considered an image-generating organ and life an image-generating process. 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 saying that since language is an act of symbolization “in the beginning was the symbol.”

Our thought processes are structured by underlying metaphors; thinking and the symbol originate in bodily experience. Jung states: “The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima.” ^x Traumatic experiences attack the connection between body and mind, spirit and instinct, with the result that the symbolic meaning-making function is severely impaired and individuals loose a sense of animation, playfulness and imagination.

As in Jungian understanding transformation of the psyche happens through its inherent unconscious and autonomous symbolizing power, the analytic task in working with trauma cases is to foster a growing ability to symbolize the trauma and its manifold meanings. We need to reconnect to this bodily basis of meaning and imagination that plays such an important role in the analytic imaginal space between analyst and client. Gustav Bovensiepen describes how the symbolic attitude and symbol formation can be used in the transference- countertransference frame to develop a symbolic space; for him “analysis in its totality is a symbolic space par excellence.”^xi

Jung termed the psychological function of symbol formation the transcendent function, a natural, goal oriented and prospective process that springs from the tension of opposites and manifests as energy in our dreams and visions.^xii This relational dynamic of integration is a meaning-making process on the individuation path, a process that can also be translated into attachment theory terms as “appraisal“, a constant evaluation of the world which is necessary for survival and therefore particularly relevant for trauma survivors. The psyche engages in a constant process of interpretation and re-interpretation of implicit and explicit patterns of symbols and images. Jean Knox^xiii has shown how meaningful experience depends on the transcendent function, a process that compares and integrates internal objects and the self, explicit and implicit knowledge, left brain and right brain, cognition and emotion.

The conceptualization of the “transcendent function,” manifested as a confrontation of conjoined opposites, provides a healing pattern that offers containment and order in a chaotic and confusing unconscious psychic state.

Although symbol-making is considered a natural activity, we find that traumatized people often are severely damaged in their capacity to symbolize. It seems as if trauma undermines the transcendent function, although this notion of symbol and the workings of the transcendent function were conceived by Jung in his own state of extreme crisis.^xiv

The integrative power of Symbols

The word symbol traces its origin to the Greek word “symbolon,” meaning proof of identification.^xv In ancient Greece, two friends who were parting from each other performed a ritual: they would break a clay tile in two, one piece for each. Anyone who at a later date produced the missing half, be it the friend himself or a member of his family, was entitled to be received as a friend. The clay tile was the visible evidence of the psychic bond between the friends. The etymological background points to a very important property of symbols: the symbol is unitive, it creates relationship, and it originates in duality. A symbol is always relational, and symbolization is an act of translation fostering new connections. The Greek verb sym-ballein means to join, to throw together. It throws together two halves, joins and connects opposing forces and even suggests something more which cannot be named or fathomed, reaching into spheres beyond speech. Jung stresses the reconciling function of the symbol, its mediatory power, uniting human beings with each other and with what is beyond.

The symbolic offers a holistic approach to the spiritual concerns of our patients, because the symbol “points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined.”^xvi Symbols reveal the dualism of all that exists, while they also reconnect the poles with each other, building bridges between the conscious and the unconscious. They challenge boundaries, bridge opposites and reconcile them with each other, being both revealing and concealing at the same time, organizing chaotic experience into meaningful structures and a kind of order.

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

This function of the symbol is urgently needed in trauma therapy where we have to create a safe symbolic space in which the depth of the traumatic experience can be uncovered and the nameless terror of the void and the abyss, the archetypal experience of abandonment and betrayal, can be symbolized. This quality of symbols to bind together and join dissociated fragments assists us in overcoming dissociation that is caused by traumatic splitting.

Symbols are “pregnant with meaning.” They belong to our original, archaic, human language. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm postulated: “Symbolic language is the one foreign language each of us must learn.”^xvii Symbols span a bridge between the visible and invisible and point the way to a hidden reality, which we experience as meaningful. Emerging from the fertile soil of the unconscious, they bring us in contact with the deeper layer of being, with the ultimate source of our collective basic ground. Symbols connect external objects and events to inner psychic reality, and they apprehend more than cool reason can ever comprehend, a wisdom that Shakespeare has already conveyed to us. As signposts they announce a larger frame of reference, connecting us to the oldest layers of the human mind and mediating between the rational and the irrational. Edward C. Whitmont, in The Alchemy of Healing,^xviii ranks symbols among the “most potent transmitters of energy, able to move mountains.” As transformers of libido and manifestations of archetypal activity with a great liberating and transformative quality, they enhance our awareness.

Symbols as messages of wholeness emerge from the creative potential of the psyche and help us to move beyond our state of isolation and alienation. The potency of symbols is related to this spiritual longing for wholeness. Working with symbols and myth–making is a powerful tool for achieving psychological integration, bringing the fragmented parts of ourselves “home” and helping to achieve a greater sense of continuity in life.^xix

We create symbols in order to recreate ourselves, to create meaning and make sense of the confusing multiplicity of the world. Symbols point to something new. They have a prospective-purposive function, moving us forward and making us permeable for the other, the ultimate, the numinous that 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 messages of symbols, pictures, and dreams are always a step ahead of us. They crystallize the focus of our impending psychic development in an image or metaphor. When we are at a dead end, frozen and petrified, when we cannot move forward or back, the unexpected appearance of a symbol may rescue us by setting the psychic process in motion again.

At the very points where the physical and psychic foundations of our existence have been most severely damaged and where the feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world dominates our psychic landscape, symbols can appear with special poignancy to let throw light as through a fissure into the prevailing desolation. When trauma strikes and the ground give way under our feet, we lose touch with our own centre and fall into an altered state of consciousness that precipitates a symbolic quest with a deeply spiritual underpinning.

The symbol of a labyrinthine journey

The labyrinth is an ancient image of order, combining the imagery of the circle and the spiral in a meandering path. It bears great similarity to the non-linear spiral dynamics that we encounter in working with trauma survivors. It is a symbol of tension and dynamic movement, a metaphor pointing to a difficult, confusing situation. Like analysis, this journey leads repeatedly close to the desired centre, but then we are again far away from where we want to go. For me, the symbol of the labyrinth represents a model for the flow of psychic energy and analytical work. This is a centred nonlinear process where fear of impasse lurks constantly – the dead-end – and also fear of being seized by something bigger than the ego and beyond control. But there is also hope of empowerment after reconnecting with the energizing centre, the inner sanctum. I consider the labyrinth to be a symbolization of the soul’s journey toward transformation. The individuation process of a traumatized person resembles the meandering spiral journey that Jung described: “The way to the goal seems chaotic and indeterminable at first, and only gradually do signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go around in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals.”^xxi

The archetypal background of trauma

Trauma reaches into an archetypal level of consciousness where the symbolic dimension and imaginal approaches become central for the healing process.Traumatic experiences activate archaic levels of our psyche and constellate an archetypal landscape which is highly charged with affect.

Trauma is existence in extremis, a “destroyer of meaning,” but also a potential catalyst for a new orientation in life. I view the destruction in the context of the progression of life, just as I envision individuation as a sequence of death and renewal, in which disintegration and destruction are opportunities for new creation.

Trauma has been conceptualized in multifaceted ways. Traumatic life events cannot be assimilated with the victim’s inner schemata of self in relation to the world (Horowitz)^xxii; they destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self (Janoff-Bulman)^xxiii and cause a disturbance of affectivity. Krystal believed that trauma produces a regression in affect, an impoverishment and a deficit of the capacity for symbolic representation and fantasy formation^xxiv. Winnicott points to the necessity of a good “holding environment”^xxv to deal with disintegration anxiety caused by traumatic events, and Kohut^xxvi refers to the dissolution of a coherent self. Kalsched^xxvii shows how trauma ruptures transitional processes of human relatedness that constitute meaning.

The experience of archetypal suffering inspires the use of religious and mythological language in order to communicate the unspeakable. We lean on myth to describe what is essentially indescribable. We refer to trauma as an experience of “hell,” of “God in exile,” of a terrifying encounter with the dark side of God, with “Deus Absconditus,” who parades “heaven as an abyss” (Celan) and inflicts the archetypal experience of being cast out and forsaken. We symbolize trauma as a “yawning abyss”, the “black hole” (van der Kolck, Farlane), and the “void” (Krystal), an experience of “anti-creation” (Primo-Levi), severing”the thread of life” (Asper), creating a “tear in the self” and a rift in the psyche. Trauma victims suffer from impaired human relationships, from “the broken connection” as Robert Jay Lifton^xxviii has termed this sense of alienation, a state of “being outside of culture.” He believed that trauma disrupts the capacity to develop images and symbolic forms that provide a sense of continuity and he states the necessity for transformation and reanimation of these symbols in order to find new meaning.

This archetypal dimension of trauma has a “numinous“(R. Otto) quality, the mesmerizing power to destroy as well as the capacity and the power to give life and to renew. When our world-view falls apart and our whole way of being crumbles, the prison of the ego can break open. This archetypal boundary experience of the black hole that defies description can open into holistic dimensions, to the transformation of consciousness and to individuation. When trauma strikes, our perception of ourselves and the world undergoes a radical reorganization. The meaning of the word “catastrophe” in ancient Greek is a turning point, and it is precisely at these turning points that an enantiodromia (Heraclitus) can occur. In dynamic systems theory, phase transitions happen when “symbolic density” is heightened, a concept that Jungian analyst George Hogenson has developed.^xxix Trauma research refers to the transformational 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 philosophy of life and spirituality. The wounding and the suffering in traumatic states can be a gateway for the numinous, experienced often as “the dark night of the soul,” calling for transformation and growth and possibly leading to the “Dark Light of the Soul.”^xxx The traumatic experience of our own nothingness and of the insubstantiality of the ego is one such a numinous experience.

The archetypal aspects of traumatic experiences connect to a transpersonal dimension in which the issue of meaning and the need to accept the paradoxes of human life is at stake. The symbolic attitude is most essential for traumatized individuals because it reconnects the person with something beyond; it re-establishes a broken connection and facilitates a shift of attitude, a 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 somatic unconscious of the analyst is stimulated. I adopt an imaginative method using metaphoric images, based on an attitude of intuitive receptivity. This establishes a space free of value judgments and open to the emergence of possibilities. This fosters growth and movement toward change. I try to embody a receptive state of awareness, an ability to wait and tune into the “archetypal frequencies” in order to better understand the interactive field in which we are moving. Murray Stein stated “The interactive field is in between the field of the collective unconscious and the realm of subjectivity, while at the same time including them both.”^xxxii

The healing quality of this interactive field has been described by Jung. By following his hunches and listening to something within himself, he was quite at sea in terms of rational interventions but then he also came up with an irrational, instinctive reaction that were healing, like singing a lullaby with his mother’s voice to a girl who suffered from insomnia. The mysterious healing power of images, words and songs allow the unconscious to break through and move the individual to change the conscious attitude.

In order to tune into the silence and the body language of my traumatized patients, I need to allow myself to enter into a state of analytic reverie and metaphor , the kind of dreaming state that Bion referred to in his concept of Reverie.^xxxiii When I attentively listen to my own experience of resonance, I can use the inner images and metaphors that originate in me from the shared imaginal realm to reflect and organize the patient’s experience, reframe the story and transform the often chaotic, archaic material into conceptual thinking. My own inner images may point to the patient’s potential and to their resources and strengths. Co-creating, we develop a symbolic approach that allows us to access latent creative possibilities and that nurtures the process of increasing consciousness. Entering into the patient’s pain empathically rather than wanting to cure it requires a joined suffering and mourning of what cannot be repaired.

The reliable presence of the therapist provides a symbolic space where containment can be experienced. In this “enabling space” of the analysis, which is an “incubation chamber” or an “alchemical vessel,” mutuality is experienced and traumatizing emotionally loaded images can be safely embodied and an archetypal healing force constellated. When I engage fully with my traumatized patients, a space for creation unfolds between us with reciprocal healing images arising in me as part of our joint fantasy and intuitive dialogue. Through this subtle mode of exchange, formerly blocked areas of experience are called back to life and resources accessed. The metaphorical amplifications of the story, the reciprocal transference of moods and the mutual reflection of feelings, are part of an identity forming process.

It is of course of utmost importance when working with the imaginal realm to assess the strength of the ego in order to use the right interventions and to prevent an intrusive flooding of emotional images, a blurring of boundaries and an inappropriate state of fusion.

The process of transference-countertransference can be viewed as a dialectical relationship in which changes are produced not according to a fixed program, but in a dynamic, systemic, jointly determined process of mutually responsive interaction or “co-evolution.” Jung’s idea that treatment is the product of reciprocal influence is especially applicable to the relationships we need to establish in trauma therapy: “The encounter of two personalities with each other is like the mixing of two chemical compounds. If they mix at all, both will be altered.”^xxxiv The same idea has been expressed by Balint when he refers to the “harmonious (or disharmonious) interpenetrating mix up.”^xxxv Balint also stresses the value of “entering into” the patient’s suffering as the key healing factor. The soothing responsiveness presupposes a solid groundedness of the analyst, since trauma can have a poisonous contagious character. The therapist must guard against “psychic infection,” which means to literally take over the sufferings of the patients as Jung postulated.^xxxvi Whitmont describes this deliberate identification with the patient’s state as “a vicarious self-offering by virtue of a conscious empathic “suffering with“. His or her own wounds resonate with the client’s in the course of the mutually inductive effects of the therapeutic relationship.”^xxxvii

Listening with the third ear

I believe that a particular way of listening is required that is different from Freud’s “evenly suspended attention,” a listening with the third ear as Theodor Reik^xxxviii described it. It works in two ways: it picks up what patients do not say but only feel and think and at the same time it is a listening turned inward. In this mode the therapist listens to an inner voice, a kind of prospective listening to what demands to be born. This mode of listening creates a healing environment in which being is doing. Jungian analyst Kathrin Asper speaks of the “mother specific attitude” that we need when working with severely wounded patients. Like a mother who intuits empathically the unspeakable, we need to adopt this kind of affective attunement that promotes growth and can gratify needs that cannot yet be articulated.

Listening to people who have been tortured is like listening to voices from the underworld, the land of no return. I was reminded of the mythical underworld, where the whole person is in life but devoid of life, when I encountered the tortured prisoners of war who had survived the camps in Omarska, Manjaca and Batkovici. They were dead to the world. Although they looked like living human beings, their entire mode of existence had been vaporized. “We only look as if we are alive,” they said when I interviewed them a couple of 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 human beings who walk as the dead in the midst of life. If the symbolic function is destroyed, they no longer have any living relationship to their own psychic creativity. This is because symbols transfer libido into activity and ultimately give meaning to life.

Maybe we need to couple our listening with the third ear with cultivating a mode of seeing with the third eye, a deepening perspective that Hillman proposed as “seeing through,” looking from the angle of the imaginal: “This is what depth psychology has always insisted upon: look at conscious events and intentions from the unconscious, from below.”^xxxix

I remain alert to archetypical images that may arise in me in response to what I hear. Sometimes the image of the phoenix emerges, a mythological symbol of the process of renewal since this bird is consumed in the funeral pyre and then arises up out of the ashes; sometimes it is Leviathan, the embodied Chaos monster that inhabits the ocean’s depths with the ability to swallow even the sun. Encountering a chronic state of traumatic fixation, I might experience the person as swallowed up by Leviathan. Myths of Osiris and Dionysos, images from Dante’s Divine comedy, narrations of life in hell pass through my mind in working with trauma survivors.

From myths we have become acquainted with processes of dismemberment and of dissolution or disintegration, which lead to enlargement rather than to a narrowing of consciousness, to finding rather than losing meaning and to love rather than hate. When I enter the chambers of evil, I am accompanied from within by these stories of the underworld, and the “consolations” of the stoic philosophical therapeutics help me to do my work in the archetypal field of death and renewal.

Working with traumatized people challenges my ability to act as a container, allowing the somatic transferential and countertransferential symptoms to emerge. I need to attune to what cannot yet be told, to the unknown that might emerge in my own inner space with incoherent, fragmented images and with flooding bodily sensations. The clients’ dreams and images unconsciously evoke my own unconscious reactions, and the archetypal pattern within myself responds to what is constellated in the interactive field between us.

With supportive containing and holding, empathically attuned resonance, and the bridge-building of the reflective stance, I try to reconnect these patients through active imagination, art, sand play and fantasy to their own symbolic capacity. Our circumambulation often dances around the death and rebirth pattern as a core archetypal theme in the process of transforming trauma. These mythic patterns connect traumatized patients with their own pressing existential issues and hence provide a feeling of connectedness, healing the experience of being “outside of culture.”

Working in an integrative manner and taking into account contributions from related fields, I weave the process of therapy by exploring the symbol systems of religions, myths and fairytales about our age-old human confrontation with the mysteries of life and death, destruction and renewal, dismemberment and reconstitution. I think of Ovid and Heraclites with their firm belief in change and transformation, that nothing visible keeps its form and nature, the transformer of all things creates from the old ever new shapes.

The dynamic development of the symbol assists in the capacity of adaption and facilitates greater self regulative and meaning-making processes. The traumatherapeutic process can be seen as a kind of emergence from darkness, deep pain, anguish and a distorted state of mind to one in which the transformation to a truer and more accurate view of self and world takes place. Lisa McCann and Laurie A. Pearlman refer to the allegory of Plato’s cave to describe this as a “… gradual process of accommodation as the person moves from blindness to catching a glimpse of the new reality.”^xl The wounds are calling out for healing and development after the ego has been forced to give up its central position.

Working with pictures and guided imagination

Images touch us at a deeper level than words. Traumatic imagery usually consists in disturbing flashbacks and fragmented vivid images that represent symbolic manifestations of traumatic memory. The chaotic nature of emerging images causes overwhelming affects, which are experienced metaphorically as avalanches, volcanoes, earth quakes or tsunamis. Transforming these images and encouraging the patient to create healing images that provide safety can be done by guided imagination – facing the danger together with imaginary figures and inner helpers, helpful animals or the assistance of the analyst. All creative expressions like drawing, writing poems, fairy tales or journal writing facilitate the process of revisioning oneself beyond the victim stance and creating a new identity. Pictorial expression may restore the ability to speak and to initiate communication after long periods of dwelling in a silent and bottomless abyss. Creating pictures is a leap forward in the ability to make contact and communicate.

In a picture, clients can discover and envision themselves in a new way as active persons. The value of the picture like the value of the symbol consists in the capacity to create a new vision of reality. For traumatized individuals, the attempt to depict their suffering in a picture represents an attempt to master the trauma, to communicate and to get hold of overwhelming affects, and to regain some power .The process of composing a picture can be liberating, giving an image to the monstrosity of the experience without getting drowned in the re-experiencing of the trauma. This creative process is a working through of the haunting inner representations of traumatic images.

To create a picture is a first step toward recreating oneself. To paint implies relating – to the brush, to the paint, to the paper. This relieves the client’s total isolation, the condition of “the broken connection.” No matter how hopeless its content might appear to be or in what deep solitude it might have been painted, every picture is a step out of isolation, because the painter has some awareness that another person may also look at it. Pictures originate in a sense of relationship, including that between the painter and the image. When we create pictures we restructure reality, and in so doing we also restructure ourselves. In symbolic representation we can repossess lost or severed fragments of our identity.

As the trauma itself breached boundaries, so the creation of images in therapy also serves to cross boundaries and is orientated toward transcendence. The process of producing symbols promotes self-regulation and integrative processes. It enables one to encounter oneself and to engage in a dialogue, where the archetypal content of the picture can be integrated into the psyche through intrapsychic communication. Painting is a creative act in psychotherapy, an imaginative leap in an effort to create a new identity for oneself. Relegating threatening contents into the framework of a picture, a feeling of safety and distance from them is created.

I find art-therapeutic approaches particularly helpful because they strengthen self confidence and self worth, assist in gaining psychic stability, lead out of fragmentation and initiate integration. In giving form to traumatic contents, images make difficult inner processes more transparent and activate hidden creative potential, at the same time strengthening healthy aspects of the personality.

I also include receptive art therapy in my therapeutic work with traumatised clients. Pictures of Hieronymus Bosch, Goya, Picasso, Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois and Frieda Kahlo help me to symbolize dismemberment, splintering, violence and psychic fragmentation. I facilitate many varied modes of expression and creation, as I have described in my book Soulmurder. Incest and Therapy.^xli

Often significant dreams of the type that Jung called “big dreams,” which may be full of daemonic horror or enigmatic wisdom,^xlii reveal the transformational energy of the collective unconscious pushing through in traumatic states. Through encountering the dragon, the devil, the Minotaur, the hidden treasure or the black wise woman, the numinous embedded in our own psyche gets symbolized. Depending on the strength of the ego and the phase of the trauma therapy, engaging in active imagination with these figures can be a path to the exploration of unknown and uncovering the meaning hidden in these images.

The relevance of rituals

Rituals are inherent to the nature of human being and reflect the autonomous activity of the objective psyche. They have always been used to deal with critical stages of life. Centering on the mystery of life, they deal with the intersection of ego and self. Rituals help to quieten the mind, soothe the soul, and mend the heart. In trauma therapy, they serve as a container for powerful emotions and archetypal forces, mediating between consciousness and the unconscious, fostering the emergence of the transcendent function. The healing energy of sand pictures as in sandplay makes the unprocessed traumatic experience more amenable to integration. They symbolize the need to defend, protect, and create a safe temenos, and to enact processes of death and rebirth. Creating rituals of letting go and mourning too releases energy and is an important stage in the healing process.

Being aware that imagination stimulates more regions of the brain than mere words, trauma therapists focus on a variety of hypnoprojective techniques that help to stabilize, control and regulate the process. These are well known as screening techniques, such as imaginary videotape, safe place, tresor or a treasure chest to store traumatic material, or an inner team and inner helpers to assist in gaining mastery over intrusive images. Analysis is a symbolic healing ritual where the traumatic wounds become tolerable and less tormenting. We need to clean the wound, attend to it, get the dirt out, seal 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 perceived and described, and the future anticipated. A meaningful, living myth is made up of the elements that shape one’s life .The concept of “narrative identity” goes back to Paul Ricoeur ^xliii and refers to the stories people tell about themselves in order to define who they are.

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

Storytelling in narrative psychology is a mode of “self-making and world making,”^xliv an attempt to reconstruct a coherent sense of self by transforming life into a narrative. Narration functions to form and to frame the chaos of trauma. Analysis works with these healing narratives to structure subjective experiences and promote a dialogue between conscious and unconscious material. The trauma narrative can be considered an odyssey of self, an attempt at self-creation. Traumatized human beings are in search of a new concept of themselves and therefore are also in search of a new myth, one that takes account of the trauma they experienced and attempts to decipher the pattern and the meaning of these events.

Jung felt strongly about the mythic nature of personal experience and repeatedly stated that he felt driven to know his own myth.

In the ritual of analysis, the trauma story gets reinterpreted over and over again, meaning ascribed to it, behaviors explained and justified, broken links reestablished. In so doing, the client gradually regains control and unfreezes. These stories are told from different vantage points, in words and in images, to develop meaning, to increase coherence and to clarify orientation. They are always changing in the course of analysis; they are just as fluid and unstable as the concept of identity is. Just as individuation is an ongoing process, there is also an ongoing process of attribution of meaning to 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 to create new options for thought and behavior. Trauma survivors must transform and create themselves anew. They must establish themselves as an “evolving identity.” When in traumatic shock, when the world as one thought it was is shattered, when one’s ego has been toppled from its directing function, one is compelled to reconstruct and recompose one’s identity in order to recover a feeling of coherence. To reshape traumatic experiences into a story is a creative act of coping, for in this way the story-teller gains control over the traumatic event, at least in the aftermath. Trauma narratives are, in a certain sense, ways of recovering something lost and attempts to find out how one’s personal fate fits into the scheme of things.

The imaginal trauma stories convey how clients emotionally came to grips with the shattering of belief systems and worldviews and how they ultimately elaborated their personal experiences within a more collective and even spiritual perspective. In analysis, the elaboration of this personal myth in archetypal, symbolic and imaginal language takes place. The new paradigm in trauma therapy known as “post-traumatic growth” indicates how personal and collective myths are created in the aftermath of suffering, reflecting also one’s relationships to the transpersonal dimension of human existence that was triggered by traumatic experience. The experience of torture, for example, has forced individuals to consider the question of what they are ready to suffer or even die for. In other words, they are forced to deal with the issue of “ultimate concern,” a concept developed by the theologian Paul Tillich^xlv. The numinosity of trauma may either put the survivor in touch with this ultimate concern that can only be expressed symbolically, or the traumatic experience may lead to the loss of any ultimate concern and throw the individual into existential anxiety or into utter meaninglessness. We must help our clients to connect to the capacity for renewal, applying symbolic and imaginal consciousness in order to decipher the mythic dimension of what has happened to them. We assist them to figure out how their traumatic experience has shaped their awareness of the main concerns in their life, their values, worldview, and their connection to the infinite.

In my practice working with survivors of torture, sexual violence and war inflicted traumas, I listen attentively for archetypal patterns, which emerge in the stories of violence. In extreme situations in which a client is most vulnerable, archetypal patterns and dynamics are more likely to break through and to take charge in creating a sense of identity and meaning. Roesler^xlvi has observed that in traumatic situations when the ego is most vulnerable, the psyche tends to find its new orientation in basic archetypal patterns. The modes of experience, behaviour patterns and styles of narration comparable to those in myths, fairy tales and works of art and poetry appear in the stories. There is a blending of personal and archetypal patterns in these narratives of an emerging self. To pay careful attention to how the stories are being shaped as blueprints of a future life and to the meaning that is attributed to the traumatic event, to which role the traumatic event is given with respect to the person’s feeling about life and his interpretation of himself and the world, helps to identify the basic archetypical pattern that unconsciously casts the traumatized in the role of victim or hero and that directs the process of individuation.

Richard Stromer^xlvii in his work on personal mythology as pathway to the Sacred refers to Pieracci^xlviii who coined the term “ontic myth” to refer to a set of beliefs dealing with how one should be in this world, how people are or ought to be in order to avoid the repetition of trauma. There is an interdependent relation between how the experience shapes the creation of the myth and how the myth shapes further experience. In listening to such “ontic myths,” I focus on the archetypical patterns and combinations of symbols that appear in the images, and I identify the person’s resources and any protective factors. I am guided by questions such as: How does the traumatized person describe the struggle for survival after the trauma? Which models are called into play out of the treasury of archetypical wisdom, myths, religions, literature, film and music, in order to find/give meaning? What may I learn about the “miracle” of healing and rescue, about the archetype of the wounded person and that of the wounded healer, about victims and perpetrators, about the child-archetype and that of the hero, about surrender and sacrifice? The manner in which human beings cope with grow beyond and overcome their traumatic experiences demonstrates the capacity of the self to create meaning.

Stages of the Symbolic Quest

In trauma therapy we usually differentiate between various stages of healing. First, safety and stabilization is the primary concern. We need to create a temenos with clear boundaries and structure. This establishes an atmosphere of compassion and solidarity. We have to strengthen the capacity to tolerate painful emotions that are connected with intrusive imagery, and we slowly accompany the circuitous descent of our patients into the underworld. As analyst, I provide the link between the two worlds, the Ariadne thread holding the “broken connection” for the wounded person who has descended into the realm of the dead. Timing and pacing is of extreme importance, also patience and persistence. I think of the myths of Demeter and Persephone or of Inanna as images for the process of recovery. There are times in the therapeutic process where the wounded person goes back again and again to the netherworld, to times of feeling dead again. I need to trust the process that this continual dying countless deaths is a necessary phase of this quest in order to be reborn.

In the second stage of healing I help the patient to confront and symbolize the traumatic core through guided imagination. The exploration of the imagery system of memory is a very powerful affective experience that needs to be carefully planned and prepared. Sufficient inner strength to bear the often deeply frightening images and a capacity for self soothing is a precondition for this phase. Mourning the losses like Demeter is a very important step during this stage. With the help of dreams and active imaginations, I support the process of weaving a new life myth, and I encourage expressing this narration symbolically. Rituals assist in this process of the newly emerging self. Adopting a state of reverie, I tune into where this person appears to me as most whole, most genuine, most at home, and I encourage the patient to engage in an inner dialogue with this “other being” within. Working with the emerging images and archetypes gradually fosters the process of symbolization and transformation.

In the third stage of the work there must be a return from the underworld to join the world of humans again and face the task of creating a future. This phase is like a homecoming after a very perilous quest to remake oneself, separating from the old way of life, and moving into a new mode of being and relating to oneself and the world. Having reclaimed lost parts of oneself and mended the broken connections may feel like finally having found the hidden treasure, a spiritual experience which paves new paths to intimacy and solidarity with others and often a new relationship with the numinous. The patients have achieved a narrative competence and are able to tell their story of wounding, struggle, descent and return as their own myth of wholeness. The individuation process, forced upon them through traumatic events, helped them to become who they are and to know themselves on a very deep level. Some of my trauma patients would agree with the insights a former client of Jung wrote to him: “Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality- taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be-by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. …”^xlix

Joining Jung’s efforts to rescue the living symbol from annihilation is often a slow painful process of re-membering what was dis-membered and of retrieving what was lost. I am only too acutely aware of the limitations I encounter in myself as an analyst doing this work, with the burning question Rilke poses in the first Duino Elegy ringing in my ear: “All this was mission – but could you accomplish it?” ^l Then I find Jung’s consoling words echoing in my soul: “The serious problems of life…are never fully solved. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.”^li

Embracing these problems with my whole being is my contribution to the opus.