The following is an excerpt from Tom Singer's chapter in The Dream and its Amplification.
Introduction
Amplification as
an idea or a technique is relatively easy to understand. As a living reality,
it is far more elusive to evoke than to explain. The lived reality of weaving
an amplification can take on a richness and texture that is as elegant as any
of the finest fabrics in the world. And amplification, when lived, is a fabric
that is woven by time, memory, image, feeling, sensation, idea and perhaps even
a glimpse, at times, of divinity.
The goal of
amplification is to catalyze a transformative process in the relationship
between the personal, cultural and archetypal levels of the psyche. The study
and use of amplification should begin with the specificity and uniqueness of an
individual's life that expands into the life of specific cultures, and
ultimately finds its roots in the archetypal or universal dimensions of human
experience. The quest to find meaning in symbolic imagery by
tapping into archetypal sources can transform an individual's life trajectory
and release unexpected creative energies.
Personal Story and
Original Dream Image
This chapter
offers a personal narrative of my experience of amplification. The initial
context and setting for this story occurred more than forty years ago and
remains alive inside me to this day because the wondrous thing about an
amplification living in the psyche is that it continues to weave its magic and
meaning over time, as long as one pays attention to it. In the fall of 1965, I enrolled as a first
year student at Yale Medical School, having just returned from a year of
teaching in Greece following graduation from college. The year in Greece had been one of glorious
discovery and the awakening of a thirst for life. I imagined myself following
in the footsteps of Nikos Kazantzakis and his Zorba the Greek. I explored modern Greece, its magnificent
landscapes and people, always accompanied by the haunting memories of earlier
eras that murmur to one in the stones, the trees, the sky, the sea.
You might imagine
how I felt when I returned to the United States and moved into the medical
school dorm. New Haven was quite a long way from Greece and quite a brutal way
to sober up from the intoxication of Greek adventures. My newly acquired taste
for life vanished almost instantaneously .
I felt a dread settle over me.
Most of my classmates came charging into medical school, armed with
anatomy, physiology, microbiology and the other basic medical sciences already
under their belt from undergraduate studies. I had taken my basic premedical
course early in college and hadn’t taken a science course in three years.. Yale was enormously
forgiving and, unlike any other medical school in the country, had almost no
exams for the first two years which afforded me some time to get my feet on the
ground. Yale had the strange idea that
the students they admitted would find their way and didn’t need to be
sadistically tortured into becoming good doctors. So, I found myself
desperately struggling to catch up in the first two years but not flunking out
because we had no tests or grades.
.....
Fig. 4. Cecrops, King of Athens, upper half as
civilized statesman, lower
half as coiled snake’s tail
(Harrison 1912,
263)
Thomas Singer, M.D. is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the San
Francisco Bay Area who writes about culture, psyche, and complex from a Jungian
perspective. He is currently at work on a series of books that explore cultural
complexes in different parts of the world. The first two volumes,
Placing Psyche: Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia and Listening
to Latin America, have been published in the Spring Journal Books series of
Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Culture of which he is the series
editor. Other recent Spring books that he has edited include Psyche and the
City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern World and Ancient Greece, Modern
Psyche: Archetypes in the Making. Dr. Singer also has a long-term interest
in the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) and serves on its
National Board.
The Dream and its Amplification is available on
