Pinkola Estes provides a beautiful description of the inviolable personal spirit… the author fails to see the malignant inner figure as ‘duplex,’ and she denies its relationship to trauma or ‘negligent fostering,’ prefering to see this figure as simply a being in the psyche that ‘is what it is.’
Kalsched acknowledges Estés’s evocative account of the personal spirit while arguing that her refusal to link the inner persecutor to trauma etiology undermines clinical and therapeutic understanding.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis