Amplification, Transference Analysis and the Analyst's Inner Process

This Paper investigates the way amplification comes into my clinical work—what I actually do, the effect of amplification on transference analysis and its role in the symbolic process.

The paper does not survey Jung's use of amplification nor review its general use, but explores how I use it, as an analyst interested in transference analysis and also in many cultural fields.

I define amplification in this context as the use of images or associations related to themes that are historical or religious. The first might be prehistory, archacology, literature and the arts, and the second religion, mythology and fairy tales. Jung notes that while historical themes led to the collective, mythological or religious ones led to the personal. He made a similar distinction between the two methods of treatment, reductive and synthetic: ‘The former traces everything back to primitive instincts, the latter develops the material into a process for differentiating the personality. The two methods are complementary’. (JUNG 7, p. 252). ‘The constructive method is necessarily individualistic, since a future collective attitude can develop only through the individual. The reductive method, on the contrary, is collective, since it leads back from the individual to basic collective attitudes or facts’ (JUNG 6, p. 423).

Today we commonly consider that reductive work plus reconstruction from transference information leads back to the personal as well as to the collective.

There are different kinds of amplification. A patient may have had a phantasy and then thought, for instance, of Elijah, and the analyst might join in: this is sometimes considered separately as active imagination, but I have included it here as a form of amplification. Or the analyst may think of Elijah and talk about it to the patient. In a