Trauma and bodywork: Unconsciously-Directed Self Formulation

Kelly Polanski

LECTURE: Friday, April 11th, 7-9 PM

WORKSHOP: Saturday, April 12th, 10 AM-1 PM

St. Lawrence Anglican Church

This Lecture will discuss the evolution of psychology’s theoretical and clinical approaches to earliest experience and trauma.

The big picture of our lifetime’s selfhood can only eventually be understood inside our timeless experience of “selving”—first coming into being in early infancy and childhood while incarnating within ourselves that ineffable ‘spark’ of our individuality that Carl Gustav Jung called the ‘Spiritus Vitae’ (Latin)—our instinctual spirit of life (Jung, CW 13, p168 †62). But what if something went wrong in the earliest selving of the first year long before any ego coherence? Coming into being through unconscious processes we find a fount of formulating part-self-states or forms Jung described as “the glancing fragments of a dissociated ego…just flickering into life here and there wherever outer or inner events, instincts, and affects happen to call it awake.” (Jung CW 8, p387).

What happens to the constitutional self in an emphatic case where trauma (Latin, wound) inwardly hits these fresh part-self-states during their fragmentary selving formulation in the deepest psyche- somatic unconscious? And what does this mean for our individuating selfhood that must finally integrate to centralize any of our disparate part-self-states by arcing back full circle to them—as a uroboric self-reflection of wholeness-making across a lifespan?

In the Workshop we will ask important questions attempting to unearth our earliest, and as yet, “unformulated experiences” (Stern, D.B., 1997) and find out what it means to finally meet these part-self-states on their own terms. This mysterious process of the slow and agonizing spiritual embodiment at the core of self- formation has been a preoccupation of depth psychologists for many years—especially in the work of Carl Jung and his followers—most notably Michael Fordham (Child Psychiatrist, Jungian Analyst, and co-editor of Jung’s English Collected Works) and Erich Neumann (MD, psychologist, philosopher, and Jungian Analyst). The benefit of their hard-won discoveries in working with the formative unconscious has found a wider application in the consciousness presenting for Jungian analysis today by granting us new return admittance into the contextual nesting ground of wholeness making energies to address very old unresolved traumatic origin wounds for their retrogressive birth.

Participants for the workshop will need to bring a yoga mat and 2 foam yoga blocks for the Yin positions.

About Kelly Polanski

Kelly is a native Albertan who grew up hiking the hilly evergreen banks of the Athabasca River, where it was said “you either going up or you are going down.” After acquiring degrees in Commerce and Clinical Counselling, she became a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht, Switzerland where today she is a member of The Assembly of Accredited Analysts. She has enjoyed private practice for 19 years in Edmonton.