The Dream and Its Amplification [The Fisher King Review Volume 2]

"Amplification of Dreams" is not a light book, but one rich in its variety of earnest expression. These fourteen authors reach down into their depths to bring personal insights about the mind's (or psyche's), dream capacity -- or you may say, the amplification thereof. Every chapter is different, it's a book to keep nearby, pick up and read over parts again, as I have been doing, and enjoying it more as I do so. What stands out for me? To mention a few: Isler's Alpine Dreams making their way into the regions centuries old fairy tales, Wikman's own near death emxperience embodied as a dream, Swift-Furlotti's dream wherein an actual snake ritual and initiation, or new birth, takes place. Snakes, which are probably the oldest recognized key dream image around, come up again in Singer's heart touching story. Abramovitch 's attitudes on Jewish dream work from early Talmudic times, is similar to the 6th century Ancient Greeks, in the Temple of Asclepius, where seekers sought the priests' counsel in the dream abaton or temple. Shalit mentions the power of archetypal or dreams of the collective, like Jungs's rivers of blood dreams, 1913, just prior to of World War I. He dispenses a large amount of Jungian information here. If you're a thinking type you may respond one way, a feeling type, then you'll have another reaction. Gilda Franz writes with all her heart in 'Dreams and Sudden Death' and gives us some practical advice on how to delve into and amplifiy one's dream. Dream work is not new, Jung just expanded upon it greatly for our present era and in doing brought a whole new dimension to the science and art of psychology. These fourteen scholars manage to bring all of their wisdom and experience under one tent. I wish I had had this bok in psych grad school 18 years ago, although one does not need to be an academic to appreciate it's scope and depth.

This book is fabulous! It offers vivid portrayals of the dream life and how this world mirrors our conscious experience. In my experience books on dreams are either uber scientific and indecipherable to a person with little or no psychological education or they are completely unsophisticated. This book is perfect.

Havent read it all yet, but found the first 3 articles distinctly pedestrian. Good ideas but prosaically exprest.

YES! JUDGE THE BOOK BY ITS COVER Review of two collections: The Dream and Its Amplification, edited by Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti, Fisher King Press. 2013. And Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, edited by Patricia Damery and Naomi Ruth Lowinski, Fisher King Press 2012. The ebullient cover art serves as the gateway to The Dream and Its Amplification. Howard Fox’s painting “A Giant Dream” draws us into a sumptuous, archetypal world of mountains, gargoyle-laden temples, to a bridge with a naked, giant sleeping with his head upon a fire truck. In the canal below, a man treads water as a mermaid speeds toward him in a motorboat. Speculation abounds. Who is the man in the water? Is the sleeping figure on the bridge a giant or a god? Who are the people lurking in the shadows of the temple – or is it a castle? Surely this book cannot live up to such a cover. And yet, in essay after essay from Jungian analysts across the globe, it does, offering a hologram of perspectives, even as any given dream, if tended from different angles, can yield multiple meanings. And meaning is very much at the core of this work. We follow Ken Kimmel into the world of the Maya Shaman, Ronald Schenk opens us to Gnostic myth, Gilda Frantz traverses the interplay of dreams and death itself. The latter brought me a great sense of understanding a peace, as she writes about the dreams that prepared her for the time when death would “call” upon a loved one. Erel Shalit evokes an Israeli man’s dream of a handless Arab child. Beside the child, the Earth herself extends four hands severed from their limbs up through the asphalt, as if crying to all of us: when will we grow the hands –and the arms-- we need to grasp each other across the barriers of ancient conflict? This cry of the archetypal Feminine echoes throughout. I found myself returning to the mermaid on the cover in the speed boat (or is she a mermaid? We cannot see the end of her green body…a tail or a bit of clothing??) She hurries through the water to this drowning man…or is he simply out for a swim in the canal, and it is we ourselves who make crisis of it, rush to rescue, when perhaps what is needed is for us to stop the motor and allow ourselves to drift for awhile in our own reverie…? I was familiar with Nancy Qualls-Corbett from her seminal work, The Sacred Prostitute (Inner City Books, 1988). How lovely to encounter her again in Redeeming the Feminine: Eros and the World Soul. She shares the dreams of a patient, a very hard-working, high-functioning woman, who, like so many of us, grew up with a mother who could not give the depth of love she needed in childhood. Her dreams are a descent into an ancient archetypal world that guides her, ultimately, to the discovery of her buried feminine nature. This opens in her a state of being that allows a new masculine energy to emerge and join with the conscious feminine. Qualls-Corbett goes on to weave the strands of individual healing into the wounded feminine of the great Mama to us all: the Earth. Similar stories of transformation abound in what I consider a companion work, Marked by Fire, Stories of the Jungian Way. Though these volumes were published a year apart, I found them deliciously complimentary. On this cover we encounter Barbara McCauley’s painting, Flight Into Egypt, a dream-like scene of a woman in a bright pink pants-suit sitting sideways on a grazing white horse. Behind her, in the mist, an enormous ghostly figure (a god? a man? a monster?). The woman looks directly out at us, seemingly unaware of the looming presence behind her. In her eyes, a curiosity, a searching, even as her body rests in contemplation on a motionless steed. Once again, the imagination soars: who is she? What is the looming vision behind her? Why doesn’t she turn around? What is that tall shape in the foreground – a giant flower? A pillar? A sign-post?..... Again, the work lives up to its cover, nourishing us with essays by some of the same Jungian analysts who grace the pages of The Dream and Its Amplification, and many new ones, each offering riches. I will close with a sampler. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s Drunk with Fire is a fluid journey of poetry and prose that begins with Ms. Lowinsky’s frustrations with her mentor, C.G. Jung. This frustration is gloriously resolved with the publication of The Red Book. She writes, “He ‘outed’ himself as a poet and painter. He writes directly out of his vulnerability, working out his relationship with his soul in the depths of the mythopoetic imagination, just as I do.” She proceeds to share an Active Imagination that is as entertaining as it is enlightening: a dialogue with C.G. Jung himself. At one point Jung takes on the energy of the trickster, morphing into Groucho Marx! The humor is balanced with the profundity of the journey. Here is a soul’s awakening in the fullness of the human dimension. The poetry – inspired by dreams or images of waking life - shows us how the creative process can be endemic in making the soul whole. I commend both of these beautiful books to you, as gifts for thoughtful friends, or an offering to yourself. They stand alone, but taken together, grace the reader with a cornucopia that invites the reader to call forth the thunderbolt of your own creative fire. Reviewed by Elizabeth Clark-Stern, author of Out of the Shadows: A Story of Toni Wolff and Emma Jung, On the Doorstep of the Castle, and Soul Stories.

It provides concrete examples with a link to life events and decisions showing us how the unconscious not only shows us the conflicts but also supports our decision-making process. A fantastic book.

I think the best way to look at this book is how Dr. Jung advised looking at the unconscious itself; that is, with eyes wide open to separate the wheat from the chaff. The fourteen essays are designed to illustrate how the use of parallels as found in mythology, folk tales and other art forms help to clarify the meaning of dreams. While the book's blurb correctly states that amplification "becomes particularly important when the image does not carry a personal meaning or significance and is not part of a person's everyday life", I don't believe that this point is emphasized enough throughout the book itself. Instead, especially with some of the contributors, there tends to be a slippage into a kind of grandiose view of amplification, treating it as if every dream has to be viewed through this potentially intoxicating prism. Following this procedure religiously can invite parody as was once devastatingly executed by James Hillman. Therefore in my view, some of the essays are written by analysts who have not adequately heeded Dr. Jung's warnings to avoid becoming "identified with the archetypes" with which they are dealing. The result in my opinion is sometimes a style of overblown language which could all too easily put off newcomers to the Jungian approach to the unconscious mind. Dr. Jung himself had the ability to combine a certain down-to-earth practical side while also getting across the very real transcendent aspects of the psyche. Similarly, the recent book by analyst Dr. Donald Kalsched, "Trauma and the Soul", is an excellent example where no slippage occurs regarding the usual Jungian standards and one is able to absorb both the practical side of therapy along with the great depths of the spiritual side of the psyche in an involving, vital way. Another example of what I feel is a certain careless approach to the maintaining of fundamental standards includes the fact that, while the Introduction expresses gratitude "to the eminent Jungian analysts" who contributed chapters to the book, most of the "Biographical Statements" lack the basic phrase which I have relied on over the years, namely, one that states accreditation by a recognized Jungian training institute, e.g. "A diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich", or of New York etc. While it's clear from some of the biographies lacking this statement that the person must have been accredited by a recognized Jungian training facility, with others it's not so obvious and perhaps even doubtful. Of course, very insightful ideas and views regarding the Jungian approach can be found among therapists and others who were not trained in an accredited Jungian institute, but I personally prefer to know the exact qualifications of someone who is presenting himself or herself as a "Jungian analyst" (eminent or not) in a publication that's apparently purporting to contain an official Jungian viewpoint. In addition, there are in my view some inaccurate definitions present which are beyond what one would consider just a bit of internal bickering. For example, the term "nigredo" is essentially defined in one of the essays as "black alchemy". In contrast, it is defined, for instance, by analyst Daryl Sharp in "Jung Lexicon": "An alchemical term, corresponding psychologically to the mental disorientation that typically arises in the process of assimilating unconscious contents, particularly aspects of the shadow." I think it's possible to see in the phrase "black alchemy" a certain leaning towards a "New Age" approach which in my view is not productive in our increasingly frenetic world which needs some solid, usable methods which can be adopted by the "average person". This touches on a main point that I wish to make as illustrated by the overall nature of this book. While in my estimation it does contain some very professional, readable and valuable essays, others display a generally poor quality and these often spiral off into a sort of airy elitism, containing in addition a fair amount of name-dropping of renowned figures in Jungian circles as if to boost the author's own shaky contribution. Unfortunately, such a trend is not new and could further damage the chance for the very useful and meaningful methods of Jungian psychology of reaching an ever growing audience which instead appears to be a shrinking one. For example, I live in a metropolitan area of over three and a half million people. In the 1980's and 1990's, the local Jung Foundation had a paid membership of 600 persons who came from all walks of life. An eight month season of eight or nine public lectures presented analysts from around the world and these talks were regularly attended by 300-400 members and non-members alike in an easily accessible public auditorium. In addition, numerous and regular seminars were also available. At present, there are about 75 paid members, mostly academics (very pleasant and agreeable people), but the public lectures, given by local analysts for the most part, occur only about two or three times a season and are held in small lecture rooms barely attracting 75-80 people at most. In addition, a couple of long-established Jung Foundations in other cities had to shut down for a lack of interest in recent years. While I know that there are various flourishing groups related to the study of Jung's ideas, I don't believe that this is a growing trend in general, especially when it comes to moving further into society as opposed to a kind of "let's stick with the 1%" approach. This is likely due in part to what I would call a fairly frequent tendency to a kind of isolationism among Jungians in general, however friendly they might be. And this situation is added to by the sometimes "florid" and impractical language related to Jungian ideas that can appear in a book like this one. So again to quote the blurb, the book "offers the seasoned dream worker as well as the novice great insight into the meaning of the dream and its amplification", but I personally would not recommend this book to someone who wants to start learning about approaching dreams from a Jungian standpoint. Better books for this task include analyst Robert Johnson's venerable "Inner Work" and Dr. Jung's opening chapter of "Man and His Symbols". "Jungian Dream Analysis" by James Hall is also very valuable along with various other books by Mary Ann Mattoon, Marion Rauscher Gallbach, Donald Broadribb, Edward C. Whitmont and others. To sum up, in reading "The Dream and its Amplification", the "seasoned dream worker" in my opinion would likely have a mixed experience, probably enjoying, for example, "Coal or Gold? The Symbolic Understanding of Alpine Legends" while perhaps not being as keen on, for instance, "Sophia's Dreaming Body".