11/03/2025
I wanted to post a particularly potent thread of the content from clinic three that wraps today. It speaks to the heart of early attachment injury, which is, along with early attachment reparation, the heart of the SAP training program. Loving Kalsched's ongoing contribution to our clinical understanding.
The infant’s process of development is to bring experiences into coherence. For the infant, in the “earliest phases of psychological life…experience is dis-continuous, and un-integrated, existing in the infant’s mind as “flash-pictures” of sensation, affect, image, behaviour, or memory” (Kalsched, 2025, p. 669).
In the thinking of Stern (1997, 2010) we can think of this as unformulated, and a normal process in infancy (Kalsched, 2025).
The developing infant needs a co-regulating other, the caregiver, to psychobiologically modulate their system thus allowing these unformulated experience to link, coming into form, find coherency, and take on meaning. “However, if early trauma strikes at this vulnerable time, then the formulation process is interrupted by dissociation which maintains the fragmentation by keeping the parts that might eventually constitute whole experience dis-aggregated, unformulated and unconscious” (Kalsched, 2025, p. 669).
Kalsched, D. (2025). War in the Consulting Room: When Rage and Hatred Enter the Analytic Field. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 70(4), 663-682.