The Abandoned Child Within

Lack of self-worth is an affliction that has become of increasing concern in all industrialized societies. It is the main symptom of what psychiatry calls narcissistic disturbance, a phenomenon far more widespread than it was when Freud and Jung developed their concepts of depth psychology. The lack of commonly held values has contributed to it, but is not its cause. In this in-depth examination, Kathrin Asper, a noted psychotherapist and president of the Swiss Society for Analytical Psychology, addresses the real cause: lack of self-worth as a direct consequence of physical or emotional abandonment during childhood. The wounded inner child lives on in the adult, expressing himself in such symptoms as fear of abandonment, lack of feeling, grandiosity and depression, insufficient awareness of one's own life, disproportionate rage, and unclear needs. However, those suffering from a lack of self-worth tend to forget the early-life incidents that hurt their inner self: the child within suffers, but is mute. To heal the early wounds, we have to get in touch with the inner child and make her talk. In The Abandoned Child Within, Dr. Asper shows how this is accomplished. Using concrete case histories from her own practice, paintings by patients, dreams, fairy tales, and myths, she vividly describes the consequences of abandonment, and ways to unleash the creative powers of the unconscious, which can initiate a healing transformation.