The Dissociative Self Care System is a concept elaborated most fully by Donald Kalsched in his 1996 depth-psychological study of early trauma. For Kalsched, the term designates an archaic, bipolar psychic structure that activates when ordinary ego defenses cannot contain the annihilating anxiety of primal wounding. The system simultaneously protects and imprisons the inviolable core of personhood — what Kalsched identifies with Winnicott’s True Self and Jung’s Self — sequestering it from further contact with a world experienced as catastrophically unsafe. The system’s daimonic guardian figure can function as protector and tyrannical jailer in equal measure, and its compulsion to repeat the original dissociative act in later, otherwise benign situations renders it, in Kalsched’s formulation, uneducable. Kalsched maps this structure onto fairy tale motifs, alchemical imagery, and the dream material of analytic patients, situating the system at the intersection of Jungian archetypal theory, object-relations thinking, and trauma psychology. Adjacent theorists such as van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Ogden address structurally related phenomena — structural dissociation of the personality, somatoform sequelae, and sensorimotor fragmentation — without deploying Kalsched’s specific terminology, producing a productive tension between archetypal-symbolic and clinical-structural accounts of the same defensive economy. The term thus sits at the crossroads of Jungian depth psychology, relational trauma theory, and contemporary dissociation research.