Dissociative Rage Is Not Shadow: Kalsched Dismantles the Archetypal Alibi for Human Violence

Donald Kalsched’s 2025 paper, published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, accomplishes something Jungian clinical theory has needed for decades: it strips away the archetypal explanations for human destructiveness that have functioned as intellectual evasions. Jung treated violence as eruptions of the collective shadow—the Wotan archetype possessing Nazi Germany, the dark side of the Godhead elaborated in Answer to Job. James Hillman, in The Soul’s Code, attributed Hitler’s evil to a “bad seed” rather than the documented childhood beatings Hitler endured. Kalsched names these explanations for what they are: “an unfortunate development in our theory—maybe even a dangerous one—and lead us into a dead end.” His alternative, drawing on Kohut’s distinction between Tragic Man and Guilty Man, locates the origin of the most severe human destructiveness in primitive dissociation following early attachment trauma. The rage that erupts in the consulting room—and, by extension, in the world—is not instinct seeking expression but a defense against unbearable shame that was never formulated, never “ego’d,” and therefore cannot be remembered, only repeated. This is a direct confrontation with Klein’s claim to have found “proof” of innate aggression in children’s envious attacks, and with Freud’s death instinct. Kalsched does not deny instinct altogether, but he subordinates it: “man’s warlike instincts are employed so we don’t have to feel things.” The clinical and theoretical stakes are enormous. If destructiveness is primarily dissociative rather than instinctual, then archetypal amplification alone will never reach it. Only relational contact—analyst and patient discovering the shame together—can undo the dissociation that fuels the violence.

The Analyst’s Wound Is the Instrument: Enactment as Mutual Descent into Shame

The case of Henry is the paper’s center of gravity, and its most radical move is not what Henry does but what Kalsched does. Caught in a full-blown enactment—flooded with murderous hatred, rehearsing fantasies of firing his patient—Kalsched does not interpret from a safe distance. He goes home, endures a sleepless night, and tracks his hatred to its developmental source: a pitched battle with his own father on a car ride from the airport, the unmetabolized grief of being misunderstood and dismissed. The next session, he shares the emotionally relevant parts of this memory with Henry. This is not confession and not self-disclosure as technique. It is what Allan Schore describes as the analyst’s capacity to “regulate her own bodily based emotions and shame dynamics well enough to stay connected to her patient.” Philip Bromberg goes further: the analyst’s failure and shame about it “is the only way for him to know, from the inside out, what the patient’s distress is all about.” Kalsched enacts this principle literally. By descending into his own “Guilty Man” shadow material—the repressed “bad me” states—he provides the imaginative and memorial capacity that Henry, trapped in the pre-verbal dissociation of “Tragic Man,” cannot supply. The healing does not come from insight delivered to the patient. It comes from the analyst allowing his own defensive structure to crack open, thereby modeling the very vulnerability that the dissociative defense system exists to prevent. Winnicott’s “Hate in the Countertransference” is the acknowledged predecessor here, but Kalsched extends it: the analyst must not only tolerate hate but trace it back through his own biography to its root in unmet attachment longing. Paul Russell’s formulation—“hate is on loan against the time when the healing can occur”—becomes the paper’s emotional thesis.

Dreams Formulate What Enactments Repeat: A Jungian Correction to Relational Theory

Kalsched’s engagement with Donnel Stern’s concept of “unformulated experience” is deeply appreciative but contains a pointed correction that marks the distinctiveness of his Jungian position. Stern claims that unformulated, dissociated material “can enter the treatment only via enactment.” Kalsched disagrees: “It isn’t only relationally that unformulated experience becomes conscious. It happens all the time in dreams!” This is not a minor technical quibble. It preserves the Jungian commitment to the autonomous psyche—the idea, foundational in Jung’s complex theory and elaborated in Kalsched’s own The Inner World of Trauma (1996), that the unconscious is not merely a repository of failed relational experience but an active, image-generating system with its own telos. The daimonic figures that populate the dreams of traumatized patients—the axeman, the shotgunner, the octopus-killer from the 1996 book—are not just beta elements suitable for evacuation in Bion’s sense. They are symbolic formulations of dissociated experience, emerging within the relational container of ongoing therapy but not reducible to the interpersonal field. This dual emphasis—the relational and the imaginal—is what makes Kalsched’s synthesis distinctive. He integrates Stern, Bromberg, Schore, and Bion without collapsing into a purely two-person psychology that evacuates the archetypal dimension. The unconscious “telos” of the transference field, which he invokes near the paper’s climax, is a Jungian concept that no relational theorist would use, and it does real work here: it explains why the enactment with Henry was not merely repetition but a purposive attempt by the psyche to reach a “new ending.”

Innocence as the Final Dissociative Defense

The structural model Kalsched proposes—violence, illusion, and absolute innocence as the triad sustaining severe dissociation—deserves particular attention. The dissociative defense does not merely block painful feeling; it preserves a sense of inner “goodness” and innocence that cannot tolerate contamination by shame. This connects directly to the self-care system elaborated in The Inner World of Trauma, where the daimonic protector-persecutor encapsulates the vulnerable child-self precisely to keep it “innocent”—untouched, uncontaminated, but also unlived. Henry’s righteous anger, his conviction that every analyst failed him, his claim to see “the truth” that others could not stomach—all of these are innocence strategies. They ward off the identity-state Stern calls “not-me”: the terrorized, contemptible, shamed person one was in infancy and must never become again. Kalsched’s innovation is to show that the analyst’s corresponding innocence—the professional identity that refuses to be a failure, that insists on being the “good therapist”—is the matching piece that locks the enactment into a destructive stalemate. Only when both participants relinquish their innocence does the war end.

This paper matters because it demonstrates, with unflinching clinical specificity, that the Jungian imaginal tradition and the relational psychoanalytic tradition are not competitors but complementary tools for reaching the most primitive layers of human suffering. No other text in the current literature shows an analyst using active imagination on his own countertransference shame in the middle of a relational crisis, then bringing the fruits of that inner work back into the dyad as a bridge to the patient’s dissociated grief. It is a model for how depth psychology can remain both archetypal and embodied, both mythic and relational, without sacrificing either pole.