Dream Image

The dream image is the specific phenomenon with which the practitioner of dream-work is concerned: not the dream as narrative nor the dream as meaning but the image as image — the scene, the figure, the creature, the place as it presents itself in its own visual-affective specificity.

The archetypal method, articulated by Hillman in The Dream and the Underworld and by Patricia Berry in [[berry-echos-subtle-body|Echo’s Subtle Body]], asks the practitioner to stay with the image rather than to translate it. The image is psyche itself, not a sign for something else; the clinical and interpretive work is the sustained attention to the image in its own register, against the habit of moving immediately to what the image “means” in the dreamer’s biography. amplification — the setting of the image alongside mythological and alchemical parallels — is the method by which the image’s transpersonal resonances are heard without being substituted for the image. See dream-ego and image-as-psyche.

Relationships

• dream
• image-as-psyche
• amplification