Donald Kalsched

Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Psychoanalyst in private practice in Brunswick, Maine. Born in Marshfield, Wisconsin, he grew up amidst the lakes and woodlands of central Wisconsin and earned his B.S. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1964. He then attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City, receiving his M.Div. cum laude in 1967 with a specialty in Psychiatry and Religion. His graduate thesis, titled 'Hesse's Demian as an Exemplar of the Individuation Process,' reflected his early interest in Jungian psychology. He completed his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Fordham University in 1972, with a dissertation on 'Adaptive Regression and Primary Process in Dream Reports,' and completed a three-year rotating internship at Veterans Administration Hospitals in New York.

Dr. Kalsched completed his training in Analytical Psychology at the C. G. Jung Institute in New York, graduating in 1978 with a Diploma thesis titled 'Narcissism and the Search for Interiority.' He subsequently served as a faculty member and supervisor at the New York Association of Analytical Psychology (NYAAP) and the C. G. Jung Institute, and served on the C. G. Jung Foundation Board. From 1985 to 1988 he was President of the national Board of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). In 1986 he became head of the Institute for Depth Psychology at Wainwright House in Rye, New York, where he founded the Professional Enrichment Program in Jungian Theory and Practice (PEP), a study community that became the seedbed for his landmark first book.

He is the author of two foundational texts in the field of Depth Psychology: 'The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit' (Routledge, 1996) and 'Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption' (Routledge, 2013), both translated into many languages. Dr. Kalsched teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, pursuing his interdisciplinary interest in early trauma and dissociation theory and its mytho-poetic manifestations in the mythic and religious iconography of many cultures. He is a member of the Maine Jung Center, the C. G. Jung Institute of New England, and the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, where he regularly teaches and supervises candidates in training.