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Encounters with “Dis” in the Clinical

Situation and in Dante's Divine Comedy
Donald E. Kalsched Ph.D.
Published online: 11 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Donald E. Kalsched Ph.D. (2013) Encounters with “Dis” in the Clinical Situation
and in Dante's Divine Comedy , Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health
Professionals, 33:5, 479-495, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2013.815065

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 Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 33:479–495, 2013
Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver
ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online
DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2013.815065

Encounters with “Dis” in the Clinical Situation

and in Dante’s Divine Comedy
Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D.
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This article focuses on the inner world that results from trauma-generated dissociation and, through
two clinical vignettes, explores how to work with the primitive forces that are liberated in the transfer-
ence when daimonic levels of defense have become necessary to survive unbearable affects in early
childhood. An archetypal story (Dante’s descent into the Inferno) is used to demonstrate the preter-
natural presences that haunt or harrow the inner world of dissociation and how they are optimally
approached. Comparisons are made between a depth-psychological understanding and contempo-
rary relational theory in their respective approaches to the treatment of trauma and dissociation.
Recommendations are made for a “binocular stance” that keeps both the inner world and the inter-
personal world in view as I try to humanize the primitive idealizations and diabolizations that infuse
the transference in work with trauma’s survivors.

The false God turns suffering into violence

The true God turns violence into suffering. [Weil, 1987, p. 65]

In this article, I offer some reflections on dissociation from the perspective of C. G. Jung’s ana-
lytical psychology, using Dante’s 14th-century Inferno (Dante, 1978) as a mytho-poetic1 picture
of the inner world of trauma as I have come to understand it. Early trauma and the dissociation
that follows it, leads to an inner world of primitive objects that are typical of the way in which
the psyche splits along certain basic fault lines. The resulting part-personalities and their interre-
lationships create what I have called a self-care system of defense (Kalsched, 1996). This system
or trauma complex contains a dissociative agent whose violent and attacking energy dismembers
the psyche from within, long after the outer trauma has ended. This disintegrative force in the
unconscious is the major source of resistance to the healing of trauma. It represents the “false
God [who] turns suffering into violence.”
In dreams of some patients during the working-through process, one can sometimes see
this monstrous agent of dissociation and the fortress-like enclave he creates for his helpless
prisoners—usually children” In two case vignettes, I show how the dissociative activity of this

1 This term was used by Ellenberger (1970) to describe a basic function of the unconscious, i.e., its tendency to present

itself to consciousness in the form of images that trend in the direction of archaic and typical (archetypal) objects, affects,
and images. He traces the term to Frederick Myers, Theodor Flournoy, and C. G. Jung, pointing out that this function of
the unconscious has not received the attention it deserves.
Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Psychoanalyst in private practice in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
 480 DONALD E. KALSCHED

inner object seems to be trying, so to speak, to protect a core of the personality from further
violation by reality. But this protection comes at a tremendous cost to the patient—loss of affect-
tolerance, loss of the wholeness of experience—ultimately loss of soul. To undo the profound
effects of such dissociation, the clinician must weather the storms of affect that erupt when pre-
viously split parts of the whole psyche begin to come together again. This puts the therapist on
the side of the “true God who turns violence into suffering.”

JUNG’S UNDERSTANDING OF DISSOCIATION

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More than a hundred years ago, Jung was articulating his view of the dissociability of the psyche
and the multiplicity of the mind, long before contemporary psychoanalysis began to empha-
size the multiple “self-states” of a traumatized childhood (Bromberg, 1998, p. 182) or their
neurological encoding in separate hemispheres or centers of the brain (Schore, 2009, 2011).
By the dissociability of the psyche, Jung meant the universal tendency for the ego to frag-
ment, under the pressure of strong affect, into subsidiary egos, each holding a part of the original
experience that was intolerable (in the case of trauma) or incompatible (moral conflict) with the
central ego. Although Jung included trauma among the causes of dissociation, he did not focus
on early trauma per se. In those early days of psychoanalysis, there were no infant-observation
studies and Bowlby’s investigation of infant/mother attachment did not yet exist. No-one (with
the possible exception of Sandor Ferenczi, 1933, 1988) yet understood that trauma’s impact on
the relatively immature psyche of a child could have catastrophic consequences throughout the
life-span. Today, people know more. Winnicott (1960) understood that such trauma led to “primi-
tive” defenses. Bromberg (1998) differentiates “pathological” from normal dissociation and Stern
(1997) describes “dissociation in the strong sense.”
Therapists now realize that these more severe forms of pathological dissociation can actually
fragment the components of whole experience (e.g., images, affects, behavior, memory, identity)
leading to severe deficits in affect regulation and identity cohesion (see Spiegel and Cardena,
1991). By contrast, the dissociation Jung described was of a “higher order” in the sense that
each separate “self-state” was coherent within itself with a characteristic ego-structure (known as
“affect-egos”) together with clustered associations—hence explicit memories and related affects.
Jung called these functional units of the personality, “feeling-toned complexes” and defined
them as.
The image[s] of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally. . . . This image
has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree
of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and
therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. [Jung, 1934, p. 96]

The fact that each complex has its own affect ego and its own inner coherence is related
to Jung’s further discovery that complexes tend to personify themselves as fragmentary per-
sonalities or inner objects. These personality fragments, appearing as the actors in our dreams,
seemed (to Jung) to have their own fragmentary consciousness, because they behaved as relatively
autonomous splinter psyches with their own apparent motivation. In cases of severe dissociation,
Jung found that complexes may even become loud and appear as voices with sufficient autonomy
to actually possess the ego as in cases of psychosis.
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 481

THE MYTHO-POETIC PSYCHE

In his clinical work with severely dissociative patients and their complexes, Jung was impressed
by the trans-personal nature of some of this imagery, i.e., it was daimonic2 and not yet person-
alized. Certain patients’ dreams contained images and affects that were both archaic and typical
of mythic and religious themes from the history of humankind, i.e., they were archetypal. These
themes could be positive or negative, light or dark, and in fact often tended toward the totalistic
categories of good versus evil, bliss versus oblivion found in mythic or religious iconography.
Jung saw this archetypal multiplicity as a sign of the psyche’s dissociable nature in the presence
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of strong affect.
If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche, fragmentary psychic
systems would never have been split off: in other words, neither spirits nor gods would ever have
come into existence. . . . Our time has committed a fatal error; we believe we can criticize the facts
of religion intellectually. . . . We completely forget that the reason mankind believes in the ‘dae-
mon’ has nothing whatever to do with external facts but is simply due to a naïve awareness of the
tremendous inner effect of autonomous fragmentary systems. . . . We are still as much possessed by
autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions
and so forth. . . . The gods have become diseases. [Jung, 1931, pp. 35–37]

Jung was at pains to elaborate a model of the psyche that would account for such archetypal
imagery and his solution was to add a deeper layer to his model of the unconscious—what he
called the collective unconscious. In Jung’s conception (Jung, 1947), the material from this deep
stratum appeared when dissociation was severe. Without the benefit of early infant-studies, and
before researchers understood how early trauma impacts the psyche, Jung resorted to a structural
explanation for this imagery.
In any case, under normal conditions, these impersonal, titanic affects and associated images
are slowly personalized in the child’s relationships with its caretakers so that (for exam-
ple) omnipotent rage becomes moderated through a process of projection, containment by the
object, and internalization. Winnicott (1969) described this process in his well-known, “Hullo
object!” . . . I thought I destroyed you, but you survived my destruction, etc.” (p. 222). Although
Jung did not fully understand it at the time, early childhood trauma and dissociation interrupts
this process of personalization. Originating in the earliest infantile period, and unmediated by
relationship, the primitive inner objects are retained in archaic form, threatening personality
integration from within.
Dante’s (1978) Inferno, with its violent and persecutory landscape, gives some relevant
imagery of one such monstrous inner demon who remains untransformed until he enters an
interpersonal process.

DANTE’S DESCENT INTO THE INFERNO

The first third of The Divine Comedy (Dante, 1978) is about an imaginal journey into the heart
of darkness—into the Pit—the Inferno of Hell itself, in search of the root cause of the poet’s

2 Daimons were described in Plato’s Symposium (1961, p. 555) as “half way between god and man.”
 482 DONALD E. KALSCHED

suffering. Dante’s journey is necessary, the reader is told, because the poet is depressed—lost
in a kind of midlife crisis. The first lines declare: “Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone” (Dante,
1978, 71).
The poet’s first impulse in this situation is to ascend a nearby hill the summit of which is
illuminated by heavenly sunshine, but his guide Virgil explains to him that he must go into the
darkness if he is ever to see the light. So encouraged, and guided by his beloved poet-friend,
Dante reluctantly surrenders to the downward path. According to the poem’s prescription, only
a conscious (witnessed) encounter with Hell’s chief instigator of suffering can heal the affliction
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that darkness has visited upon the poet’s outer life. In the psychotherapy situation, this involves a
revisiting of those split-off, unremembered experiences that have been dissociated in the patient’s
life, yet remain alive somehow as implicit memories, encoded in the unconscious mind, in the
body, and in relational self-states that must be re-experienced in the present with the therapist as
witness (see Bromberg, 1998, 2008).
Dante’s unremembered suffering is represented in the Inferno by a series of descending levels
of increasing depravity and persecution, leading downward through abysmal layers, ending in
the Pit at level 9. Here, surrounded by fire and ice, lives the penultimate Demon that Dante must
confront. And the poet’s name for this monster is not Lucifer or Satan, as one might expect, but
Dis, from the Latin, meaning to divide or negate. Pictured as a ghastly 3-headed monster, Dis
devours a sinner in each of his three slathering mouths, blood dripping down his three chins onto
the ice below.
Etymologically, dis means “split two ways,” or “in twain” and thus is similar to the Greek
dia as in “diabolic”—the opposite of “sym-bolic” (see the Oxford English Dictionary). Dante’s
poetic insight that the origin of evil at the center of Hell is psychologically equivalent to the
dis-integrating energies of the other world (i.e., the unconscious), helps one to relate the poem’s
medieval Christian imagery to the clinical situation where therapists are very familiar with Dis
as dissociation; dissociative identity disorder (DID); disavowal; disconnection; disease; and even
disaster, which means to become separated from one’s stars. Trauma is just such a disaster and
the loss of one’s guiding star is equivalent to the loss of one’s soul or God-given spirit—ones
true, spontaneous self.
Dante’s confrontation with Dis, which occurs in Canto 34 at the very end of his journey into
the Inferno, is a confrontation with the “God who turns all suffering into violence” (Weil, 1987,
p. 65). Dis is the great nihilist in the psyche. As a personification of aggression and destructive-
ness, he represents (in symbolic form) the instrumentality of the defense organization. In Bion’s
(1959) terms, he “attacks the links” between thought and feeling, body and mind, affect and
image, to prevent the experience of affects that are unbearable. This violence against conscious
experience of affects-in-the-body fits in a fascinating way with Dis’s mythological origins as a
fallen angel.
According to an account recorded in several ancient Jewish Apocryphal books found in the
Qumran caves, Dis (as Lucifer) was God’s greatest angel, the light-bearer (see Watts 1954). But,
owing to his identification with God’s radiance, he could not tolerate God’s decision to descend
into time and history and actually take on the human body of a man (incarnation in Christ) with
fleshly and hairy body. So he led a rebellion among the angels and turned his back on the beatific
vision, flying and falling from the Godhead into the ever-receding darkness where Being borders
on Nothingness. He thus became the great refuser, the adversary, the Lord of Flies.
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 483

This story tells something about the creation of a defense. It suggests that defenses originate
in a refusal to suffer affect-in-the-body. The prideful angel in the mind apparently wants to stay
God-like, omnipotent, and disembodied—in other words, to stay all rarified and mental. Dis then
becomes what Corrigan and Gordon (1995) called a pathological mind-object, and his function
is to dissociate.
As a personification of violence against the self, Dis seems to personify the aggressive energies
that are necessarily directed back into the inner world after trauma ruptures the child’s flow of
experience into the object-world. A child who is violated and violated again and again over time
develops tremendous anger that it cannot express to its persecutors. Instead, this aggression is
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directed back into the inner world toward the neediness that the child repeatedly feels, but must
repeatedly repress. When harnessed by the defensive system in what Ferenczi (1933, p. 160)
called “identification with the aggressor,” these aggressive energies turn into something mon-
strous, and the result is Dis. He becomes the great disintegrator standing opposite the psyche’s
inherent integrative capacities. In his later writing, Bion (1970, p. 112) spoke of such a diabolical
unconscious entity—an inner god hostile to the acquisition of knowledge of emotional experience
-K—hostile to “transformations in O”—a iniquitous antigrowth factor menacing the inner world.

GLIMPSES OF DIS IN THE CLINICAL SITUATION

Glimpses of this diabolical personification, standing in the background of the dreamer’s life,
are often seen in clinical work with trauma-survivors. I will not soon forget one of my earliest
experiences of this preternatural presence.
An anorexic patient with a significant trauma history came to see me on the verge of an impor-
tant new intimate relationship with a man. This new relationship was challenging her heretofore
rigid, obsessive defenses and their tyrannical control over herself. To her great joy and terror, she
was beginning to fall in love! Around this time, she reported a dream that much disturbed her.
She dreamed that she was enjoying herself at a sort of summer camp until she slowly realized
that no one was permitted to leave the compound. The counselors and other campers in this camp
all had perfect bodies, and they worked out incessantly to retain their youthful beauty; those who
were slightly overweight or with bodily imperfections (the patient had great ambivalence about
her own body) strangely disappeared from the compound. To her growing horror, my patient
realized that she was being watched and evaluated every day by the “Governor General” of the
camp and his staff, through a kind of overseeing eye that spied on her from above. In her panic,
she tried to escape, but was caught and dragged away by a group of this governor’s thugs in black
uniforms. Around her she saw other men and women staring passively into oblivion—having
been robbed of their souls—a kind of living death. She woke breathless and terrified, full of
longing for her new lover, but with the despairing realization that she would never see him again.
She was in a concentration camp!
The systemic oppressiveness of this dream occurring right on the threshold of her new rela-
tionship shocked both me and my patient. Here was a sinister “governor” controlling an inner
dissociated enclave in her dream, reminiscent of what John Steiner (1993) described as a “psychic
retreat.” My patient did not know she was under the interior domination of such a perfectionistic
tyrant whose oppression was directed against her nascent embodied hopes for relationship, but
her dream made this clear.
 484 DONALD E. KALSCHED

DEVELOPMENTAL ORIGINS OF DIS AND HIS PRISONERS:

THE NATURE OF SELF-SPLITTING

Imagine a very small child—say a little girl of 3 years old—reaching out in love toward a parental
figure—say her father. Imagine that this happens when the alcoholic father is drunk and that he
exploits his little girl’s affection by violating her body, further terrifying her with threats if she
tells anyone. At traumatic moments such as this, the child faces the potential annihilation of her
very personhood—the destruction of her personal spirit—“soul murder” as Leonard Shengold
(1989) called it. This catastrophic possibility must be avoided at all costs, and so, something
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quite extraordinary occurs.

Suddenly she is on the ceiling, looking down at what is happening to her body, which she
has vacated. We might say that Dis has arrived and disconnected her from her body so that she
does not fully experience her experience. If a child is in an unbearable situation and is helpless
to leave, a part of it leaves, and for this to happen, the whole self must split in two to prevent the
unthinkable affects from being fully felt. Putnam (1992, p. 104) described such dissociation as
the “escape when there is no escape.”
We have reason to think that the nature of this splitting is universal. According to Ferenczi
(1933), part of the little girl in this example “regresses” back to an embryonic stage of relative
innocence and safety prior to the trauma. This regressed part will be buried deep in the body
(somatic unconscious) and will be protected by amnesia barriers and psychic numbing. On the
other hand, a separate part of the little girl in our example “progresses,” i.e., grows up too fast,
identifying with the aggressor and with the adult mind, transcending the immediate unbearable
pain with a precocious philosophical, rational, and sometimes transcendent understanding. The
progressed part then “oversees” the regressed part. In its protective role, it provides soothing like
a guardian angel. At other times, to keep the regressed part “inside,” the progressed self may turn
negative and persecutory. The result is Dis. In rare cases, if the outer trauma continues unabated,
and the person’s essential core is in danger of annihilation, it becomes the task of the defensive
“system” and its “governor general” to organize the child’s suicide (See Ferenczi, 1988, p. 10ff).
So Dis’s role is to gobble up experience that has become “unbearable” or “unthinkable”—
experience that cannot be metabolized by the psyche’s normal symbol-forming capacities. “He”
appears on the scene of a childhood where traumatic rupture cannot be contained “within the
area of the child’s omnipotence” as Winnicott (1960, p. 146) would say. An omnipotent object
himself, Dis invites the child’s spirit into a diabolical contract—a veritable pact with the Devil
promising relief of one kind of suffering in exchange for another, muted by the anesthesia of
freezing and dissociation.
And here is the really remarkable thing: In doing this, he saves something central to the child’s
future by stealing a vital spark of animated life, and locking it up behind the gates of Dis. This
leaves a divided self with a vulnerable, innocent core of selfhood in permanent hiding, wandering
an inner Hell. Innocence is retained, but split off and sadistically dominated by Dis.
So, ironically, one finds that a major purpose of the dissociative system is to preserve and
protect a regressed part of personality from immanent violation and destruction. This regressed
core, often presenting itself in dreams as the image of a “child,” is referred to by Winnicott
(1963, p. 187) as a “sacred incommunicado center” of the personality, or by Harry Guntrip
(1969, p. 172) as the “lost heart of the personal self,” or Ronald Fairbairn (1981) as the libidinal
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 485

ego. In my previous book (Kalsched, 1996, p. 3), I referred to this content as the “imperishable
personal spirit” or “soul.”

CLINICAL EXAMPLE: THE CASE OF HELEN

A young female art student named Helen, who had suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse
by her alcoholic father and no support from an absent mother, arrived at her first therapy appoint-
ment on a motorcycle in black leather and spent the entire hour in cynical condemnation of
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her roommate, who had recently gotten married and had a baby. She was tough, contemptuous,
cynical about life in general, and extremely armored against any acknowledgement of her own
pain. She suffered from a number of psychosomatic complaints—chronic back pain, incapaci-
tating premenstrual cramps, and recurrent epileptic-like symptoms where she would “go blank”
for several minutes. Her inner life was haunted by morbid feelings of being a living dead per-
son and full of overwhelming rage, portrayed in horrifying “artistic” images of mutilation and
dismemberment—chopped off hands, arms, and heads.
This patient suffered from periods of suicidal despair and disintegration anxiety in which
demonic inner objects would command her to burn herself or cut herself. She was terrified by
quasi-delusional beliefs that she was a witch or had been a witch in a past life and she had had sev-
eral past life “readings” that supported the idea that she was atoning in this life for some hideous
Karmic debt incurred from the diabolical murder of a child in some previous existence. She even
tortured herself with the fantasy that, in her past life, she had been in desperate circumstances,
was starving, and had perhaps eaten this child!
The first two years of her therapy involved a stormy process of gradual stabilization. The
patient was full of paranoid or persecutory anxiety about my influence over her inner self-
management defenses and she had a constant need to overcontrol the field between us. I had
to pay special attention to moments of derailment in the transference, usually caused by my
empathic failures, my flawed memory, my “irresponsible vacation schedule,” etc. At first, when
these micro-traumas occurred, she would simply cut off and go blank. Later, she began to feel
her anger and this led to a highly volatile atmosphere where the inner figure of Dis would be
projected in the transference and she became paranoid about my “intentions.”
Any interpretive efforts on my part, or sometimes even an effort to reframe what she was
saying to bring out her feelings, might lead to a flood of satanic images—either of me or of
herself. Omnipotent fantasies about her power to cause me illness or misfortune would erupt
unbidden—then she would feel guilty and try to surround herself in a golden light to balance
the demonic fantasy with angelic influence. Several times she felt so misunderstood and furious
that she left sessions slamming doors and cursing. Once she confessed that she had enjoyed the
demonic fantasy of “making” my plane crash on a vacation trip I had taken. And then later, in
a reflective moment, she said, “You know, these Satanic images don’t feel like me! They feel
like visitations of the Devil.” Here my patient was beginning to disidentify from her aggressive
defenses and to see them as ego-alien. Her rageful eruptions continued but became less frequent.
Somehow we survived the destruction of this period.
Slowly, my patient’s anger began to be more related and could be rendered into language,
instead of erupting as action. Daimonic energies began to be humanized and, correspondingly,
 486 DONALD E. KALSCHED

some of the persecutory anxiety of her inner world lessened. Dis was always around and could
freeze everything up again with one flap of his dreadful wings, but now behind her anger there
were the beginnings of a connection to me that she could let herself feel—at least occasionally.
She was always irritable and short-tempered but now there were interludes of warmth and
connection between us. For example, sometimes while observing me, she would begin to tear up.
I would ask what she was feeling and she couldn’t always tell me. But once (I’ll never forget it),
she said she was experiencing a little bubble of gratitude welling up from inside herself. I smiled
and repeated the word back to her with a question mark: gratitude? “Yeah,” she said “for being
able to get so mad at you and be so nasty and you don’t leave. At least so far, you haven’t left.”
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One day, in the middle of this thawing of our relations, I raised all my patient’s fees five
dollars, including Helen’s. Although she insisted within the session that she had no particular
reaction to this (everything was “fine”—just send her the bill, she “didn’t even want to think
about it”), an hour later she called me in an agitated state and broke her next appointment. She
was furious and “wanted nothing more to do with therapy and its crass business arrangements.”
“Fuck you! I hate you!” she screamed into the phone and hung up. Several days went by. I decided
not to call her back. Later that week, I received a letter in the mail with an apology for her
anger, expressing the wish to resume our sessions. When I next met her in the waiting room, she
asked sheepishly if I were “all right.” She confessed how overwhelmed she had been by rage and
anger and talked of the panic she felt at having completely “ruined” the relationship. Then she
mentioned a dream she had the night of her “explosion” on the telephone.
In the dream, she and an unknown man were on some sort of mission. They wended their way
through a thick dark woods and came eventually upon a deep cave with two stone pillars at its
entrance. Just inside, on the edge of the enveloping darkness, huddled near one of the pillars,
hid a little girl, tattered and dirty, like one of the wild children discovered in France. The dream
ended as the patient woke in fear. Helen had an instinctive sense that this dream was important.
There was something haunting to her about this wild child—something fearful, yet compelling
and attractive. She associated the unknown man in the dream to me and she thought her fear in
the dream on encountering the wild girl was like her fear when all the wild anger had leaped out
of her.

COMMENT

Here is a moment Ronald Fairbairn (1981) would have described as a terrifying “release of bad
objects” from the unconscious—something some patients dread more than anything else. In terms
of my story, these “bad objects” live in the precincts of Dis. Fairbairn said:

There is now little doubt in my mind that the release of bad objects from the unconscious is one of
the chief aims which the psychotherapist should set himself out to achieve, even at the expense of a
severe ‘transference neurosis’; . . . the bad objects can only be safely released, however, if the analyst
has become established as a sufficiently good object for the patient; [therefore] it may be said of all
psychoneurotic and psychotic patients that, if a True Mass is being celebrated in the chancel, a Black
Mass is being celebrated in the crypt. It becomes evident, accordingly, that the psychotherapist is the
true successor to the exorcist, and that he is concerned, not only with :the forgiveness of sins,” but
also with “the casting out of devils.” [pp. 69–70]
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 487

Helen had never risked this amount of rage with me before. She had “dissed” me in no
uncertain terms. Yet when old Dis was liberated from the unconscious, so was this abandoned
child-self, as if the rage connected to dissociation had to be unlocked from the inner world and
directed outward in an actual object-relationship before we could see this lost child hidden in its
cave. These lost innocent children in Helen’s psyche were encapsulated in a part of her inner
world that was inaccessible to her prideful ego, with its intolerance of vulnerability. As our
work proceeded over the ensuing months, there were many other dreams in which abandoned
children appeared, often around moments between us where we worked through some hurt or
misunderstanding to a place of greater intimacy.
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The inner child that Dis loves and hates usually carries the split-off affects in the body—affects
that are now removed from consciousness and encapsulated in what Jung calls the “somatic
unconscious” (Jung, 1988, pp. 441–444). Dis seems to direct his aggression and contempt at this
child because he desperately wants to keep this child out of further suffering in reality—suffering
which has almost “killed” this child in the past (and therefore killed him too). To avoid this
(to him) disastrous consequence, he creates a world of substitute suffering—an inner Hell—with
himself as the relentless, tyrannical supervisor of this suffering This disintegration creates a world
of repetitive suffering that goes nowhere, except into a deeper conviction of guilt, unloveableness,
and hopelessness. Such was the plight of Helen until her aggression could begin to erupt toward
an actual object—myself in the transference—where it could be slowly transformed.

THE DESCENT INTO LIMBO: PSYCHOANALYTIC PARALLELS

Crossing the Acheron river, Dante and his guide enter the uppermost level of Hell. Inside a special
walled castle is Limbo, from the Latin meaning border or edge. As the poets soon discover, Limbo
is a world full of endless lamentation—not the shrieks of pain filling the lower regions of Hell,
but hopeless sighing. Here dwell two groups of innocents, first the virtuous pagans and sages
(including the righteous patriarchs of the Old Testament) who lived for centuries before Christ’s
coming and therefore without the benefit of salvation; second, infants and young children who
either lived before Christ’s coming or were taken by death before being baptized.

We heard no loud complaint, no crying there,

No sound of grief except the sound of sighing
Quivering forever through the eternal air;
Grief, not for torment, but for loss undying . . . (Dante, 1978, p. 92)

The innocent sufferers in Limbo suffer a chronic form of misery. They are protected from the
more acute suffering that would accrue to actual contact with the inner and/or outer world, but
they are eternally stuck in a kind of suspended animation—neither fully alive nor completely
dead.
The space defined by Dante’s medieval vision of Limbo is frequently encountered in analytic
work. John Steiner (1993) described this space as a psychic retreat and suggested that it was
constructed to provide a pathological refuge for a dependent part of the personality. Judith Mitrani
(1996, p. 28) describes an inner “enclave of autism” in which a very dependent, often dying or
sick infant-part of the self is cut off from the rest of the personality by archaic defenses. It is
 488 DONALD E. KALSCHED

a place of suspended animation in which unalive but also undead aspects of the self are both
preserved and tormented.
Christopher Bollas (1989) has an interesting analysis of such a space within certain schizoid
patients and his struggle with these patients’ resistance is reminiscent of my struggle with Helen
above. Bollas said that these schizoid patients “turn away from transitional objects in order to
foster alternative objects” (Bollas, 1989, p. 118) [and an alternative world]. This alternative world
(Limbo) differs, he said, from ordinary inner space and the objects created there have a “special
presence” to them. They are “the afterlife and personify the spirits of the dead” (Bollas, 1989,
p. 118). Bollas proposed that.
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We recognize this special inner area as bounded by a ghostline. When the subject passes an object
representation across this inner line, he deliberately alters it and defines it as a unique inner presence.
In particular he has a sense of creating something else out of the actual object world, of spiriting
the essence of self and other states to this alternative world where former self and others live on like
spirits or ghosts. [Bollas, 1989, pp. 118–119]

Bollas then trenchantly described the plight of the analyst in the work with such ghost-ridden
patients: “As the analyst analyses this process, however, he finds himself in the midst of an intense
other-worldly refusal by the patient, almost a haunting cry of rejection: ‘Don’t you dare try to
bring me back into life!’ ” (Bollas, 1989, p. 138). Bollas claimed that the analyst’s very aliveness
as a person is a continual irritant to these half-dead patients. “In each case, as the continuously
living object, I became the focus of intense hate and revenge. I was withdrawn from. I was
untalked to. I was to be existentially forced into a non-existence” (Bollas, 1989, p. 138).
But the analyst refuses to enter the Dis-engaged, dissociatively defended Limbo of the
patient’s psychic retreat. Slowly, according to Bollas, the patient reengages the transitional space
between self and other that was previously foreclosed:

[The analyst’s] ability to survive, his presence and aliveness, resuscitate in the patient archaic expe-
riences of the intermediate area of experiencing. This is not the alternate world. The analyst is not
to be transformed into a double to live in the domain of alternate selves in the ghostland. The route
to this person’s object relating will then, emerge from aggression and encounter, through a form of
‘loving hate’ that permits him to come into the here and now of object relating. [Bollas, 1989, p. 138]

SECOND CASE: DIANE

Diane, came to see me for help with a new love-relationship and her extreme panic-reactions
about losing this new boyfriend. We soon recovered early memories of herself as an expressive,
animated child, whose emotional life seemed to suffer a major catastrophe around the age of four
or five. At that time, a brain-damaged younger brother was born and her parents disappeared into
their obsessive worries about this handicapped, but otherwise “beautiful,” boy, who required fre-
quent trips to a distant city for special care in a hospital, leaving Diane behind. Diane remembers
feeling close to her mother before the brother’s birth, but then “everything changed,” including
her father.
Diane’s father was apparently an irascible man with a drinking problem, frequently in a rage
at her mother or herself, often denigrating Diane’s fat body or her “stupidity.” Dinner times
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 489

in his presence were a horror as he verbally assaulted the mother for not controlling her handi-
capped son; then humiliated Diane for her “animal eating habits,” her “ugly pig-body,” for saying
“stupid” things, etc. These humiliations by her father were unspeakably painful for Diane. At first,
she would break down in tears and run to her room, but then she began to harden herself. “Later
I wouldn’t let him get to me,” she said.
Diane remembered that everything seemed to get “darker” around this time. The previously
animated innocent child she had been disappeared from Diane’s outer life, and took up residence
in a separate world—in a Limbo of lost souls. Meanwhile, a tyrannical, shaming inner voice took
over her inner world.
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The following incident occurred several months into our work together. A crisis had occurred
because Diane had been criticized by her two closest friends. Her best girlfriend had called her
“shallow and superficial,” and her new boyfriend had complained that he really didn’t know her
very well and felt she was “hiding herself” from him.
Diane arrived at one of her appointments “angry as hell” about these “insults,” but clearly
hurt underneath by these remarks and feeling uncharacteristically sad. As usual, she deflected my
initial inquiries into her feelings and tried to cover them over with black humor. But finally, in
this session, she was able to stay with her hurt and sadness for a few moments. I asked her where
this sadness was located in her body, whereupon she pointed to her heart. At this moment, her
eyes began to rim with tears. Taking advantage of this newfound affect, we were able to link the
painful criticism of her friends to the pattern of incessant shaming and humiliation by her father
and what these triggered inside her as shame and self-loathing.
As the shame-filled details of these experiences with her father emerged into memory, Diane
began to panic and have trouble breathing. A pattern of approach/avoidance regarding her feel-
ings ensued. Her eyes would fill with tears, followed by a kind of restricted, spasmodic cry. After
recovering, she would make a joke about what a “basket case” she was—then sit nervously bit-
ing her knuckles until the tears came again. Each time, after establishing a workable window of
affect tolerance in the session, I gently encouraged further explorations of her feelings, suggest-
ing that she slow down, breathe, and tell me more about what she was remembering. She made
some real progress in this session staying with her feelings, notwithstanding that, each time, she
pinched them off involuntarily, apologizing for using my tissues, and making some dark ironic
joke. Finally, to her considerable relief, the session was over.
I was moved by this difficult session although worried that I had, perhaps, pushed her too fast.
Then as she walked from the waiting room and down the stairs, my patient commented ironically,
“Don’t worry, . . . I’ll never bring the puking, mewling, little one in here again, if I can help it!”
I was shocked to hear this statement from my patient, who I had sensed was as pleased as I
was with the new opening we had found together in her feelings—feelings about which she had
become ashamed.
That night she had the following dream, reported in the next session.

I am captive with a group of young girls on a houseboat on some canal system. It is an inky dark
night—no moon. The Captain—dressed in black—keeps trying to kill us one by one. He’s sinister
and evil, like Hannibal Lechter in Silence of the Lambs. I’m trying to escape with a young girl with
whom I’m chained at the ankles but she is weak and can’t keep up with me. She slips into the water
and we can’t go on so finally we are captured. The young girl lies in shallow water. I keep trying to
pull her up with the chain so she can breathe, but she keeps falling back into the water. The Captain is
 490 DONALD E. KALSCHED

watching this with pleasure. He comes over, gives me a gloating look, and with his boot on her throat
pushes the girl under the water. I’m overcome with grief and rage as I watch her drown.

My patient knew that this dream was a direct response from her psyche to the session the
day before, in which she had risked the traumatic memories from her early childhood. What she
didn’t know was how much an unknown part of her (the Captain) hated this vulnerability and
how deeply divided she was about the shameful aspects of her past.
In our specimen dream, the young girl chained to the dreamer seems to carry the vulnerable
pretraumatic aspect of her true self. This personal spirit is the mysterious essence of animation
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in the personality—what Winnicott called the true self and that I have called the imperishable
personal spirit or soul (Kalsched, 1996). Unfortunately for the trauma survivor, this innocent
carrier of the vital spark is under a spell cast by the Devil and one of the things old Dis seems
to want is for this enspirited inner self to remain disembodied (unconscious) forever. He thus
works against the natural process through which psyche and soma are integrated in the infant’s
experience—a process Winnicott (1970, pp. 261–270) called “indwelling” or “personalization.”
One sees this in the patient’s dream. The struggle for embodiment is represented by the
patient’s efforts to pull her young companion out of the water so she can breathe. Both the patient
and I realized that this imagery related to her breathing difficulty when her sadness “came up”
from the unconscious in the previous session. Some part of her (the Captain) clearly did not want
the vulnerable feelings related to her trauma to surface. His role was to kill these feelings and
to kill her access to them (through dissociation). He thus personified her resistance to embodied
affect and his paralyzing effect in her body was to literally stop her from breathing.
Of course, the dream could be looked at differently. It is possible that the dream confirms my
worry that I had pushed Diane “too fast” into her feelings. Looked at from this angle, my thera-
peutic intention to keep her in her feelings may have attracted the projection of the dark Captain
onto me. Through this interpretive lens, she would have experienced me, like the dream-Captain,
as pushing her under water (into her feelings) and then dispassionately watching her struggle,
ready to humiliate her and drown her vulnerable self. In that case she would have been retrau-
matized, not helped by my intervention—a constant danger in working with trauma surviving
patients.
I was concerned about this possibility and explored it with my patient in the following session.
Diane didn’t consciously associate me with the black Captain. She said that it was always difficult
for her to cry “in front of” another person, but she felt I had understood her inner conflict and
she had appreciated my empathy. “There’s a part of me” she said, “that does want to kill off my
feelings. I was embarrassed when I left, ashamed of what I had exposed, but I don’t think you
caused my embarrassment.”
Our mutual understanding of her dream, together with her future therapy, helped my patient
become more tolerant of her dependent inner childhood self, and as our work progressed, she
was able to risk more embodied affect, softening her armored defensive structure represented by
the vigilant, destructive Captain. Her affect tolerance increased. Dis and his defensive demons
became more ego-dystonic and she began to get a sense of how the defense cut her off whenever
she started to feel any kind of vulnerability.
An important facet of this vignette is the way my simple inquiry about where my patient’s
feelings were experienced in her body opened up her deeper feelings and dissociated self-states.
Because the self-care system is mostly a mental top-down defensive structure, affectively-toned
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 491

questions directed to sensations in the body can have the effect of bypassing the controlling
demon of mentation (Dis), allowing the fugitive vulnerable feelings deep in the body a chance
for expression.
Such a body-sensitive approach proceeds from the understanding that past trauma and its
defenses will be encoded in present physiological states such as breath, gestures, muscular ten-
sion, averted gaze etc. and not in higher cortical regions where they could be recovered as
explicit memories (see Schore, 2003a, b). By seeking to work directly with these more body-
based, implicit memories, one can help patients like Diane become more aware of their internal
sensations and perceptions. Therapists help restore the links that have been severed by Dis.
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CONCLUSIONS

In concluding this article, I offer a few theoretical speculations about the presence of Dis in
Dante’s poem and in the modern psyche, calling attention to some of the connections between
depth psychology and relational psychology around this preternatural presence.
As I have indicated, both Jungian thought and contemporary relational theory share an under-
standing of the personality’s inherent multiplicity, but they approach this fact from different
perspectives. Jungian psychology emphasizes the personified nature of the inner world (in the
form of complexes) and how this world is populated by mytho-poetic objects, including archaic
and typical (archetypal) objects whose dynamic internal relationship can be seen in dreams. I have
shown several examples of this in these case vignettes. On the other hand, contemporary relational
theory in psychoanalysis focuses on the experiential dimension of what it feels like to engage
another person in a dissociative field and how the analyst and patient often mutually enact their
own dissociated self-states (Bromberg, 1998, 2008, 2011). The analyst’s capacity to “stand in the
spaces” (Bromberg, 1998) between these dissociated self-states opens the possibility of repair-
ing the early attachment ruptures that led to dissociation in the first place. This can be a stormy
process, as can be have witnessed in the case of Helen.
Both depth psychology and relational theory are essential, I believe, if one is to gain a binocu-
lar view of early trauma and its effects. Such a binocular view will honor both the inner world and
the relational world. Jungian psychology provides a rich map of the inner world and of that inter-
mediate space between the ego and the unconscious where dissociated self-states are housed as
inner objects. But it lacks an experience-near understanding of how to work with these dissociated
states in the moment-to-moment dialogue of psychoanalysis—the relationship between partners
in the psychoanalytic adventure. Similar to Freud’s early work, Jung’s clinical papers show a
reliance upon insight and interpretation, but not on experience—least of all on intersubjective
experience in the transference. And although Jung understood that an effective psychoanalytic
process changed both partners in the analytic dialogue (like a chemical reaction) he did not know
how to encourage the integration of dissociated self-states (Bromberg’s “standing in the spaces”)
nor did he know how to engage transference/counter-transference enactments and their repair,
through what Schore (2011, p. 80) described as “right brain to right brain” communication.
My own contribution to this interdisciplinary dialogue (Kalsched, 1981,1996,1998, 2000,
2003, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2012) has been to link up British object-relations thought with Jungian
thought as applied to the inner world of trauma, i.e., the typical patterns of defense (self-
protection and persecution) that are typical of the dissociated psyche and are found in our
 492 DONALD E. KALSCHED

contemporary patients’ dreams. This article is an extension of that project, which has required
me to expand Jungian thought to include a realm of inner objects whose raison d’ etre seems to
be the defense of a sacred core of the personality that must never be violated.
When one begins to speak of a sacred core of the personality that must never be violated, and
about possessing spirits like Dis that conspire to prevent indwelling of the spirit in the body, one
finds one’s self using language that belongs to a boundary region between psychology and reli-
gion. This is an area that interests me profoundly. As I understand this borderland, it constitutes
an intermediate area between the human and divine (between the ego and the unconscious) that
one might call daimonic reality—following Diotima’s famous explanation to Socrates in Plato’s
Symposium (1961).3
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The principle daimon I have been exploring in this article is Dis and those innocents that
he has locked up in Limbo. If one takes Plato seriously, then Dis and his prisoners have their
mytho-poetic roots in a violent mystery that goes deep into the collective fundaments of the
human psyche—deep into a layer of the psyche where dissociation operates unconsciously and
splits the world into good and evil, purity and sin, right and wrong—absolute and totalistic cat-
egories. By connecting such archaic imagery to contemporary trauma patients and their dreams,
I have tried to link developmental and relational theory with Jungian depth psychology and its
concern with the mytho-poetic realities of the inner world. Specifically, I have tried to indicate
how trauma survivors often have a trans-personal story before they have a personal one, and this
carries implications for how we understand them and their resistance to leaving the magical inner
world that has saved them. Sometimes they have been supported by this spiritual world and its
absolutist meanings in ways that the human world has never met or supported them. Even their
endless torments by Dis can be preferred to the acute suffering that lies ahead as they leave their
inner sanctuaries and return to the world of the living.
I find it interesting that the well-known Freudian analyst Hans Loewald (1978) also spoke
about how defenses can become daimonic and how they must be humanized in the process of
becoming a person. As amoral and impersonal forces of the Id, such defenses, said Loewald
(1978), “are direct counterparts to unconscious instinctual forces; they grow in the same soil
(p. 48).” They come into being prior to conscious mentation, and “they operate in everybody”
(p. 47), i.e., they are universal. Swept up in these archetypal defenses, one is caught up in dramas
that are not yet humanized—not yet personal. Eventually, they must be claimed for personal life,
through a process of tolerable suffering (in which we, as partners in the analytic adventure, will
be involved.)

This implies that it is not we who defend, but something, some so-called defense mechanism,
impersonal forces . . . such “mechanisms,” such forces are, or will become our own, and may

3 Diotima said:

[Daimons are] the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with
our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and
since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great
whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation and
incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it
is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking
or sleeping, with the gods. [Plato, 1961, p. 555, italics added]
 ENCOUNTERS WITH “DIS” 493

be appropriated—it is this potentiality for appropriation which constitutes the individual’s moral
propensity. [Loewald, 1978, 47–48]

Clinical work with dissociated patients often makes analysts allies in the process of humaniz-
ing archaic defenses that resist the process of psychic transformation. The patient goes to them
with a “self-cure” (see Khan, 1974, p. 97) already in place. This self-cure (the handiwork of Dis
and his prisoners) has worked—part way. It has provided the stability and security necessary for
survival, yet at a terrible cost—the patient’s freedom. Overriding this freedom and replacing it is
a tyrannical inner system that manages unbearable affects through dismemberment (Dis) and the
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compartmentalization of psychic life (Limbo). When trauma survivors come for psychoanalysis,
they often do not realize that such a daimonic inner system is in place, nor do they expect that
their identities, informed for many years by interpretations from this powerful system will have
to be deconstructed in the course of therapy.
In my experience, this deconstruction is made possible because some part of the patient real-
izes that the defensive system is no longer working and that the cost of compliance with its
tyrannical dictates is too high. All successful psychotherapy of dissociative patients depends upon
an alliance with this healthy and courageous part of the patient’s ego, against the disassociative
system that has taken over and captured the patient’s vital potentials.
Such an alliance is a delicate negotiation because the daimonic inner objects resident in the
patient’s unconscious, will be projected into the interactive field—both Dis and his innocents
locked up in Limbo—and the patient will not be able to tell the difference. The result can be
an intractable victim/persecutor story in which the regressed and progressed parts of the self
are tangled in sadomasochistic bondage leading to malignant interpretations of reality which the
patient takes as the truth. Such a patient (like Helen) can neither cry openly out of a genuinely
wounded place of injury, nor get cleanly angry about the abuse they’ve suffered. But they can
create these affects in the other. They are caught in a victim/perpetrator story often leading to
symbiotic unions or violent abandonments—a repetition compulsion of protection and persecu-
tion until the“system can be released into a human relationship that can hold it—hopefully the
transference.
Slowly these patients’ malign interpretations of reality break down and give way to a more
genuine and human story. We saw this in the case of Helen, who slowly began to realize that
her violent fantasies about killing me were coming from a demonic inner visitation by the Devil.
My survival of these daimonic projections led to their slow, incremental humanization as she
slowly distinguished between the “bad objects” she released into me and my separate humanity.
The defense slowly became ego-dystonic, leading to feelings of gratitude, as her violence was
transformed into suffering.
In my work with dissociative patients like Helen, I often find myself hating their defenses
(mechanistic and impersonal, as Loewald, 1978, said) while loving their innocent aliveness and
appreciating their struggle with daimonic forces beyond their control. Such patients are truly
caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. A daimonic antilife force in them has grown
terrified of the vital spark glowing at the center. This spark, now lost in suspended animation
(Limbo), is the pretraumatic, childlike potential that will ultimately be released as Dis realizes
that his violent protection is no longer needed. It is easy to hate the way these tyrannically infan-
tile patients relate to one in the transference, but it helps to see that this hatred is directed more
at their defenses than at them personally. And although they must ultimately take responsibility
 494 DONALD E. KALSCHED

for such daimonic defenses, it is not helpful to hold them responsible for Dis’s violence at the
beginning of the work—nor to give them credit for the innocence with which they may identify.
The outcome of this battle with titanic forces depends, to a frightening degree, on human
mediation, loving containment, and intersubjective relatedness. Like Dante descending into Hell,
analysts need a witnessing consciousness, like Virgil, who has lived part of his life in Hell and
understands the difference between its denizens and the human partner (Dante) who has sought
his help as a guide. The process of psychotherapy involves a constant struggle with daimonic
energies, both in the analysts and in their patients. The goal is always to serve the “true God
who turns violence into suffering” (Weil, 1952, p. 104). This means mediating volcanic affect,
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trying to metabolize violent fantasies and impulses, and helping to ground and humanize the
most angelic idealizations. In the process it helps to have an orienting image of the psyche’s
inner world as titanic powers swirl around one.
But the struggle matters wherever one encounters it, and it is shot through with spiritual
significance. C. G. Jung once said of the psychotherapy profession:

So, when the psychotherapist has to struggle with difficult transference problems, he can at least take
comfort in these reflections . . . . He is not just working for this particular patient, but for himself
as well and his own soul. . . . Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus
magnum, for it is accomplished in a sphere but lately visited by the numen, where the whole weight
of mankind’s problems has settled. The ultimate questions of psychotherapy are not a private matter—
they represent a supreme responsibility. [Jung, 1946, p. 234]

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