Imagination and Amplification in Psychotherapy

Jung's great contribution was his exploration of the importance of creative thought in the therapeutic conversation—a dialogue between two unique persons. That is my view.

A trust in the healing power of the imagination led Jung to study the nature and significance of myth, ritual and religion in the cultural history of mankind. Various techniques developed by him have been applied in many allied disciplines but, according to his own repeated assertions, he was concerned first and foremost with day-to-day psychotherapy. In the mental hospital and in the consulting room he had a vision of a wider world with its mundane practicalities and its profound mysteries—man's ‘shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends’. The ‘illusions’, dismissed cynically by most psychiatrists as by Theseus in A midsummer night's dream (Act V, Sc, 1, lines 3-17), were to Jung both a romantic inspiration and a stimulus to scientific endeavour. He set out to study the imagination as it bodied forth ‘the forms of things unknown’ not only of the ‘lunatic’ in the Burghölzi asylum, the ‘lover’ in psychoanalysis and the ‘poet’ in his ‘fine frenzy’, but also of the pre-literate savage and the very ordinary person. In later years, the method of ‘amplification’, closely linked to his concept of creativeness, was the principal tool in his research and clinical practice.

Jung's techniques were developed during a period of chaos in his personal development. What was of value to him might well be harmful to others, and it is important to investigate how far the methods applied by a most unusual man can be generalized. We are faced with the task of investigating and specifying how far and in what ways defined attitudes, theories and techniques are helpful or detrimental to what kind of patient, with what kind of therapist, and in what circumstances. In my opinion, whatever its usefulness in other fields, Jung's method of amplification as used in clinical analysis