New Fisher King Press Release - The Dream and Its Amplification

The Dream and Its Amplification,  edited by Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti, unveils the language of the psyche that speaks to us in our dreams.

We all dream at least 4-6 times each night yet remember very few. Those that rise to the surface of our conscious awareness beckon to be understood, like a letter addressed to us that arrives by post. Why would we not open it? The difficulty is in understanding what the dream symbols and images mean. Through amplification, C. G. Jung formulated a method of unveiling the deeper meaning of symbolic images. This becomes particularly important when the image does not carry a personal meaning or significance and is not part of a person’s everyday life. 

 

Fourteen Jungian Analysts from around the world have contributed chapters to this book on areas of special interest to them in their work with dreams. This offers the seasoned dream worker as well as the novice great insight into the meaning of the dream and its amplification. 

 

Contributors to this edition of the Fisher King Review include: Erel Shalit, Nancy Swift Furlotti, Thomas Singer, Michael Conforti, Ken Kimmel, Gotthilf Isler, Nancy Qualls-Corbett, Henry Abramovitch, Kathryn Madden, Ron Schenk, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Christian Gaillard, Monika Wikman, and Gilda Frantz.

 

• I.  The Amplified World of Dreams - Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti  
• II.  Pane e’ Vino: Learning to Discern the Objective, Archetypal Nature of Dreams - Michael Conforti  
• III.  Amplification: A Personal Narrative - Thomas Singer  
• IV.  Redeeming the Feminine: Eros and the World Soul - Nancy Qualls-Corbett  
• V.  Wild Cats and Crowned Snakes: Archetypal Agents of Feminine Initiation - Nancy Swift Furlotti  
• VI.  A Dream in Arcadia - Christian Gaillard  
• VII. Muse of the Moon: Poetry from the Dreamtime - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky  
• VIII.  Dreaming the Face of the Earth: Myth, Culture, and Dreams of the Mayan Shaman -  Kenneth Kimmel  
• IX.  Coal or Gold? The Symbolic Understanding of Alpine Legends - Gotthilf Isler  
• X.  Sophia’s Dreaming Body: The Night Sky as Alchemical Mirror - Monika Wikman
• XI.  The Dream Always Follows the Mouth: Jewish Approaches to Dreaming - Henry Abramovitch  
• XII.  Bi-Polarity, Compensation, and the Transcendent Function in Dreams and Visionary Experience: A Jungian Examination of Boehme’s Mandala - Kathryn Madden  
• XIII.  The Dream As Gnostic Myth - Ronald Schenk 
• XIV.   Four Hands in the Crossroads: Amplification in Times of Crisis - Erel Shalit  
• XV.  Dreams and Sudden Death - Gilda Frantz

John Beebe - Psychotherapy in the Aesthetic Attitude

Abstract: Drawing upon the writings of Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson on unconscious attitudes toward culture that patients and analysts may bring to therapy, the author defines the aesthetic attitude as one of the basic ways that cultural experience is instinctively accessed and processed so that it can become part of an individual’s self experience. In analytic treatment, the aesthetic attitude emerges as part of what Jung called the transcendent function to create new symbolic possibilities for the growth of consciousness. It can provide creative opportunities for new adaptation where individuation has become stuck in unconscious complexes, both personal and cultural. In contrast to formulations that have compared depth psychotherapy to religious ritual, philosophic discourse, and renewal of socialization, this paper focuses upon the considerations of beauty that make psychotherapy also an art. In psychotherapeutic work, the aesthetic attitude confronts both analyst and patient with the problem of taste, affects how the treatment is shaped and ‘framed’, and can grant a dimension of grace to the analyst’s mirroring of the struggles that attend the patient’s effort to be a more smoothly functioning human being. The patient may learn to extend the same grace to the analyst’s fumbling attempts to be helpful. The author suggests that the aesthetic attitude is thus a help in the resolution of both counter-transference and transference enroute to psychological healing.

John Beebe (2010) Psychotherapy in the Aesthetic Attitude, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 55, pp. 165–186