In The Inner World of Trauma, Donald Kalshed explores the world of dreams and fantasies that is revealed in the therapy of people seriously affected by tragic events in their lives. He shows how the protective measures of the psyche, designed to protect the “indestructible spirit” of the human personality, under some circumstances take the guise of terrible figures that haunt the Ego in dreams and reveries. The book provides rich clinical material to illustrate the action of the complex of early defenses, or self-preservation system. An attempt has been made to synthesize the psychoanalytic concepts of mental trauma and early defenses created by modern representatives of the theory of object relations with the classical Jungian approach based on the ideas of the archetypal world of the collective unconscious and the process of individuation.