The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization is a work by Onno van der Hart (2006).

Core claims

• The Haunted Self provides the most rigorous clinical architecture for what Kalsched mythologizes and Hillman poeticizes: the psyche’s structural division into action systems is not metaphor but measurable dissociative organization, and this precision is what makes it indispensable to any depth-psychological engagement with trauma.
• Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele demonstrate that Janet’s nineteenth-century dissociation model — not Freud’s repression model — is the correct chassis for understanding chronic traumatization, thereby repositioning the entire psychoanalytic century as a long detour away from the phenomenon it claimed to treat.
• The book’s phase-oriented treatment model resolves a tension that haunts both Jungian and psychoanalytic practice: the question of when integration is therapeutic and when it is retraumatizing — the very problem Kalsched identifies as the “negative therapeutic reaction” — by insisting that stabilization must precede any encounter with traumatic memory.

Related questions

• How does van der Hart’s concept of the “Apparently Normal Part” functioning through daily-life action systems compare to Kalsched’s description of the “false self” that “grows up too fast and becomes precociously adapted to the outer world” in The Inner World of Trauma?
• In what ways does Hillman’s argument in Re-Visioning Psychology — that depth psychology should not “cure pathological fragmentation wherever it appears” — challenge or complement the phase-oriented integration model of The Haunted Self?
• Jung argues in his essay on abreaction that the therapeutic relationship must “reinforce the conscious personality” before traumatic dissociation can be integrated: how does this anticipate van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele’s Phase 1 stabilization framework, and where does Jung’s model fall short of their specificity?

See also

• Library page: /library/trauma-and-healing/van-der-hart-haunted-self-structural/

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