Including SOUND in Working
Alchemically with Dream Images
Sven Doehner, PhD, MFA, is
a psychotherapist in Mexico City. Trained in Jungian Depth
Psychology, he has worked for many years with native Mexican
healers and guided dreamwork groups in several countries around
the world. An innovator in working alchemically with dreams, he
blends contemporary depth psychotherapy with ancestral native
healing traditions.
Abstract
Dream images and their telling
can bring forth unexpected sounds, often dissonant to what we
expect or are even conscious of, expressing the deepest sense, or
intention, of the soul.
But
different from other therapeutic work with sound, which usually
involves making and/or hearing sounds that bring harmony,
relaxation, or in some way alter one’s state of consciousness,
this proposal involves the experience of making, hearing and
allowing the often dissonant sounds that accompany a dream -
either within the images themselves, or those that appear as we
remember and tell it - to guide us in processes of deep and
lasting transformation.
The work is inspired by Alfred
Wolfson, who rescued himself from traumatizing nightmares and
memories of his days as a medic at the front lines during the
first World War, where he daily experienced the piercing screams
of wounded soldiers as they lay in the trenches with nothing to
diminish the pain of their open wounds but the sounds of their
dying agony.
Long
after the war was over, these primitive, piercing, penetrating
sounds continued to haunt him, pursuing him in nightmares and not
letting him be . . . until the day when desperation itself lead
Wolfson to literally try to EMIT the sounds he could not stop from
hearing. Sustaining the sound for many minutes first took him
beyond himself (in the sense of ego control and limits), and then
into an inner experience of images, sensations and feelings which
eventually combined in such a way as to free him of the
traumatizing memories and nightmares.
Wolfson healed himself - and
discovered the transformative power of making and allowing the
sounds that emerge from the depths of our souls to guide us into
fundamental shifts in our relationship with ourselves and with our
surrounding world.
Working with sound is alchemical
in that it nurtures transformation by giving body to emotions and
giving expression - and form - to the most unconscious aspects of
our physical and emotional selves . . . just as it can dissolve or
expand that which is fixed, stuck, contracted . . . and thereby
restore in the individual who emits the sound the pulsation (the
expansion and contraction) that is synonymous with life itself.
But as Wolfson has shown us,
sound is experiential - not something that can simply be thought
about and understood. Sound needs to be MADE in order for it to be
experienced, heard, listened to . . . and allowed to affect, guide
and transform us.
As a practice in alchemical
psychology, which favors experiential learning, sound is
participatory and provides a medium for unconscious elements to
take form (coagulate) - and then to dissolve us in deeply
transformative and lasting ways.
In
addition to interesting insights into sound-work, fundamental
principles of alchemical psychology will be presented to help
illustrate how different ways of working with the sounds that
accompany or appear with the images in our dreams (and lives) can
be profoundly therapeutic.
