An angel blocks the path of a little girl who carries a note from her mother to her father in the office. The second attempt to deliver the message fails for the same reason. The third time the mother walks with her daughter and sees that the husband has died at the table in his office.
Whether the angel was a fiction or not, in any case, he protected the girl from impressions that the child could not bear. What’s next for the angel? It depends on the mother. If she comforts the child, the angel will disappear, because his presence will no longer be needed. If the mother plunges into her own grief, the angel will remain to protect the child from loneliness. Perhaps later he will become a dark angel, saving the girl at the same time from contact with reality, and from development, for which such contact is necessary. This is just one episode among many dozens of cases in which the Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched explores in detail the work of mental forces in a situation of early trauma. The author describes the trauma as a forced gap in the development of the personality, and psychological protection as a special reality, a kind of mythopoetic cocoon for the suffering soul, from which, however, it is sometimes difficult to get out.
Kogito-Center, 488 p., 2015.