Review: The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: A relational approach to internalized perpetration in complex trauma survivors

It is a rather daunting and humbling task to review a book that is written on a subject matter that the reviewer specializes in but which the author has taken to a whole new level. My hope is that I can come close to doing justice to the intricacy, complexity and sensitivity of this important work.

Most readers will find The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: A relational approach to internalized perpetration in complex trauma survivors (Routledge, 2013), especially the small minority who specialize in treating victims of complex trauma, dissociative disorders, and organized child abuse, to be both inspiring and intimidating. This is as it should be when readers are fortunate enough to come across a book that goes beyond the limits of contemporary thinking on a range of important matters.

This book offers hope and guidance to any who are required to walk into and understand the profound forms of chaos and darkness that are inevitably encountered when helping others to undo and rework the most insidious and damaging effects of severe child abuse, multiple perpetrator abuse, group violence, trauma bonding, mental programming and “soul murder.” All of what Dr. Schwartz describes must be known from the inside and out, if therapists are going to lead afflicted individuals out of their shattered identities/realities and back into the human community.

This book displays an uncanny ability to explore the darkest dimensions of human relatedness, i.e., systematic torture, mind control and murder of the spirit, as well as many, if not all, of trauma’s most complex effects, e.g., dissociation, identity fragmentation, loss of innocence and identification with and internalization of one’s perpetrators, as well as, the destruction of any sense of personal identity and belief in collective or archetypal goodness. Judith Herman opened up the notion of Complex PTSD and Harvey Schwartz takes it to another level and also shows how to successfully work with its most complex aspects.

The author explores territories that most mental health professionals and contemporary citizens would hesitate to enter. Dr. Schwartz is willing to enter into the moral wastelands where the people he treats in psychotherapy have been deposited by their tormentors. He records the geography and dangers that are endemic to this terrain in a manner that that no book has previously done in the trauma field. Almost all contemporary forms of clinical thought are unwilling and unable to address or work with the darkest aspects of human nature and human societies. The work of documenting and analyzing the methods, madness and social complicity responsible for the Holocaust presents an ongoing challenge to our human capacity to face horrors of such magnitude. Yet the task is essential for the societal evolution of an ethic of care. In the same spirit, The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep enters the terrain of unspeakable atrocity and emerges with valuable knowledge that applies to all forms of intentional and large-scale violence.

This reviewer knows from professional experience that those who have been intentionally fragmented by sophisticated perpetrators are not able to purposefully gain access to or work through the complexity of their internal systems without the skills, courage and care of an unusually knowledgeable therapist. How to language and work with the complexity of what is involved in coerced perpetration trauma and the restructuring of a personality that has been nearly destroyed is a task of monumental proportion. This restoration and healing of a personality system that has become riddled with self-hatred, self-doubt, psychic sabotage, perpetual evasiveness and almost total mistrust of other human beings is something that most therapists (and theoreticians) are not well equipped to approach and process.

Like his first book Dialogues With Forgotten Voices: Relational perspectives on child abuse trauma and treatment of dissociative disorders (Basic Books, 2000), Dr. Schwartz’s second book, The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep takes the trauma field for a quantum leap and would be helpful to many clinicians, theorists, and lay people working in the field.  The book will likely expand readers’ capacities to better understand, work with and respect anyone who has survived coerced perpetration trauma (i.e., those whose capacities for perpetration were activated and developed by disturbed family members, criminal groups, cult, cartel, and charismatic leaders, and corrupt military and para-military personnel, as in the case of child soldiers). The chapter, Perpetrators and Perpetrator States, is the highlight of the book. It integrates essential psychoanalytic concepts with the trauma and dissociation literature. By exposing this previously hidden, poorly understand and universal form of trauma (coerced perpetration trauma), The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep provides therapists with new perspectives to potentiate effective witnessing and healing for the many trauma survivors whose suffering has gone unrecognized and untreated for far too long.

In his first book, Dialogues with Forgotten Voices, Dr. Schwartz probed deeply into the complexities of organized child abuse, intergenerational familial abuse, severe dissociative disorders and relational approaches to treatment. In that book, he detailed how predatory individuals disrupt, fragment, empty and annihilate the identities of their prey. He also examined patterns of individual and social complicity, and created a map of patterns of perpetration. While attempting to unlock some of the key puzzles of posttraumatic psychological adaptation, Dr. Schwartz’s earlier book examined the interdependence between psychosocial complicity and survivors’ internalization of patterns of complicity/collusion and their long-standing effects.

In The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep, Schwartz dives much deeper into an analysis that he started in his first book. Here, he delves into how perpetrators break and control their victims through a sophisticated mixture of: inducing intolerable levels of pain, terror, and isolation; slaughtering innocence; alternating “rescuing” with torturing; fomenting traumatic attachments; engineering dissociative splits in the personality; implanting fail-safe mechanisms; and, utterly destroying any hope that individuals will be rescued, forgiven or redeemed. The book meticulously dissects how perpetrators bind their victims to their own wounded psyches, to malevolent family, cult, criminal systems, and pedophile networks, and para-military units. It catalogues a blueprint of interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics containing the mindsets and methodologies used by perpetrators to transform vulnerable individuals (typically children) into psychological containers for the damaged, dead and toxic aspects of their personalities, while exploiting their victims’ constant fears of identity loss, engulfment and psychic annihilation.

The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep takes readers into the deep end of the pool. The book dives down into the daunting clinical challenge of trying to remain compassionate and effective in the face of an individual’s obliterated sense of self and spirit. Schwartz describes, with a level of insight and precision rarely seen in an academic book, how victims of malevolent perpetration attempt to hold onto their humanity and essential spirituality through a sophisticated usage of dissociation, internalization/identification processes, and archetypical imagery. This material is presented in a way that helps practitioners navigate through a labyrinth of dissociative obstacles, while also providing hope to both therapists and clients, especially when the essence of this work requires one to work with a population who identifies with being beyond hope, repair or redemption.

Because the psychological, interpersonal and spiritual damage sustained by the individuals described in his book was done in and through some distorted form of human relatedness, Schwartz posits the healing must be done through some transformational form of human relatedness. Describing the process of relational return in an intricate, nuanced and compassionate manner, the author illuminates how the persistent, non-judgmental, committed and knowledgeable care of a single human being can help light the path out of the nightmare maze created by scripted programming, torture and abuse, and complex traumatic bonding (all of which were deployed to shatter, destroy and ultimately control every aspect of an individual’s being).

Working at the extreme end of the interpersonal continuum, i.e., in terms of polyfragmented dissociative self-organization, radical subterfuge, and the internalization of and/or identification with evil, the author’s methods are multifaceted and designed to grapple with a myriad of malevolent forces that have been enacted upon the bodies, psyches, and spirits of his clients. The last chapter of the book takes a profound look at the transpersonal and archetypal issues that typically emerge in the wake of having been repetitively and systematically traumatized (deconstructed) by other human beings. When evil is major part of perpetration (i.e., desire to obliterate another’s sense of psychic integrity, goodness and divinity), then matters of the spirit will inevitably enter into any authentic healing process.

By adopting the best aspects of relational psychoanalysis and expanding beyond them, Schwartz provides readers with a blueprint of interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics that are so complex and convoluted that only a highly experienced trauma specialist could put them into words, let alone articulate how to use these dynamics in an effective and therapeutic manner. What is described in this book involves a level of knowledge that only a true sifu could acquire through years of having done combat with a range of violent and malevolent forces. Bridging relational and archetypal perspectives on trauma and treatment the author transcends some of the unnecessary polarization and fragmentation that plague the mental health field, offering integrative clinical approaches than have not been previously conceived or developed. This book advocates for clinicians to move beyond limited ideologies and constrictive paradigms of treatment, finding new forms of creativity and courage to effectively meet the suffering (and the unique clinical challenges and confusing presentations) of savagely abused human beings.

There are several aspects of this book that are of particular interest and which deserve special recognition:

• The archetypal journey of child soldiers as therapeutic model for transformation

·      Mutations and restorations of innocence

·      Therapists as transitional objects for trauma survivors, providing linking and integration functions across a range of dissociated ego and affect states

·      A therapist’s multiple relational approaches with multiple subjectivities

·      Reparative tactics for damaged responses to pain and pleasure

·      The technological intricacies of intentionally fragmenting another human being’s identity

·      Traumatic attachment and loss of one’s subjectivity and identity to another person

·      Primitive envy and its role in the eradication of another person’s psychic vitality and personal spirit

·      Deprogramming methods for survivors of mind control and coercive violence against others

·      Treating internalization of perpetrators’ malevolent values as survival responses

·      The importance of self-forgiveness for perpetration or collusion against a third party

·      The role of transpersonal and archetypal energies in healing and transformation

This book is a must-read for any who want to better understand and treat those who have been exposed to the most malevolent forms of human exploitation as well as for those who want to better appreciate the many paradoxical forms of courage that are manifested by the most psychologically wounded members of the human race. It should be a requisite field manual in the rucksack of all spiritual warrior clinicians who dare enter a psychic war zone, triage those who lie broken, and eventually bring some of them back home. Very few in the field of trauma are willing to enter such dangerous territory, let alone dare to succeed or to fail in assisting others back to an “ordinary” life.

The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep is an intense read. It is densely packed and almost every line has been carefully honed to convey maximum understanding for the difficult plight of working with the traumatically afflicted with internalized perpetration. There is little room to breathe in this book. As a result, readers have to proceed slowly. They should allow themselves to be affected by and digest material that will take them beyond the parameters of mainstream awareness. Because The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep provides breakthrough perspectives to allow previously unknown points of access to better understand and treat some of the most intractable conditions of the human spirit. Readers who work with these populations will most likely find that their own worldviews and practices have been transformed. If clinicians are able to comprehend and work with the populations that are mentioned throughout this book, then working with other types of traumatized individuals should be a piece of cake. For this reason alone, The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep is worth its weight in gold.

Robert Grant Ph.D.

Oakland, California 2014