Meeting 4 Mondays, every other week (Sept. 12, 26, Oct 10, 24)

“Abandon all hope, Ye who enter here.”  Words of warning emblazoned on the gates to Hell, we recognize from the first book of Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Comedy.  Using Dante’s poem as rich metaphor and drawing from various psychoanalytic forefathers in his chapter "Dissociation and the Dark Side of the Defensive System" (Trauma and the Soul, Routledge, 2013), Donald Kalsched illuminates and elucidates the inner experiences of eternal suffering in the psyches of patients who have experienced trauma early in their lives.  Work with clients who bring borderline states and early trauma to therapy can be overwhelming. We are called to witness, withstand and guide through sometimes, terrifying states with our clients. How do we,  as clinicians, hope to navigate this journey with our clients in the face of such experiences?  

I have found Kalsched’s work an invaluable resource, which has supported me in holding hope in the hopelessness that arises in these intense clinical situations. In this four-session course, we will read and explore Kalsched's chapter together; and, using clinical material, we will grapple with our own experiences of what Kalsched describes as Dante’s paradox: in order to recover hope, (he) must enter the area of abandoned hope.

Free to members, limited to 5 participants