Infant Trauma in Adults : A Jungian Selving Transformation

This book delves into the infant’s natural multiplicity as the foundation of the adult, to rediscover the impact of first year, unremembered trauma. Advancing interdisciplinary inquiry into psychology’s neurobiology, infant research, developmental research, Jungian analytical psychology, and psychoanalysis, Kelly Polanski unveils adult unconscious dissociation at the heart of trauma’s wound. She re-engages nascent part-self-state experience to unlock early psyche-somatic Selving under adverse conditions and to emancipate the spark of vitality trapped inside the gap of trauma, patiently awaiting recovery and renewal—to live. A clinical case of crib trauma vividly demonstrates how Jungian dream analysis uncovers pivotal distinctions in life’s first unconscious psychifying processes to reveal trauma’s chthonic impact and restoration. Changeling mythology illuminates the pathway of this shocking initiation into the dual destiny of the empirical and archetypal child and their epic transformational fate into whole Self experience. This unique contribution offers adult survivors of infant trauma rediscovery and renewal to live again their precious instinctual spirit of aliveness, and will be of interest to Jungian analysts, as well as psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, body-oriented somatic therapists, social workers, and individuals suffering from trauma.