Avalanche

The Seba library treats Avalanche in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Jung, Carl Gustav, Russell, Dick).

In the library 9 passages

people who are threatened with being swept away by a pathological rage may dream of a landslide or an avalanche, and there the unconscious uses an apt symbolic image to predict not an outer but an inner landslide, where the cultural behavior built up within the personality is completely covered up and swept away

Von Franz establishes the avalanche as the unconscious’s own preferred symbol for the catastrophic irruption of primitive, one-sided affect that obliterates the persona-structure and civilized ego.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis

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Two months later the first blow fell. When out alone, he was buried by an avalanche, but was dug out in the nick of time by a military patrol that happened to be passing.

Jung documents a clinical case in which a dream of inflation-driven mountaineering preceded literal burial in an avalanche, illustrating the prospective function of the psyche and the fatal consequences of ignoring it.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954thesis

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Or a fox is seen near an avalanche and the avalanche comes down. The hunter then shoots the fox but only wounds him; the next morning when he goes through the village, he sees an old woman limping

Von Franz draws on Alpine folklore in which the avalanche is triggered by the exteriorized witch-soul of the fox, linking the catastrophic natural event to the destructive feminine shadow and its uncanny causative agency.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting

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Or a fox is seen near an avalanche and the avalanche comes down. The hunter then shoots the fox but only wounds him; the next morning when he goes through the village, he sees an old woman limping

This parallel passage in the Puer Aeternus volume repeats the same folkloric motif, reinforcing the association between avalanche, witch-shadow, and the destructive anima as an autonomous force in collective imagination.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting

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You don’t think that there is some sort of collapse, avalanche, sinking, call it what you want?

Hillman employs avalanche as one of a cluster of rhetorical figures for civilizational catastrophe, insisting that living in the present moment of collapse—rather than mythologizing rebirth—is the psychologically honest stance.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting

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What about the Russian avalanche of 200 million slaves?

Jung deploys avalanche as a political-psychological metaphor for the mass-minded, collectively unconscious momentum of totalitarian collectivism, a force indifferent to individual differentiation.

Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975supporting

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What about the Russian avalanche of 200 million slaves?

The identical passage in the earlier Letters volume confirms Jung’s consistent rhetorical use of avalanche to signify collective psychological regression overwhelming individual consciousness.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973supporting

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set the stage for the research avalanche to come. Hundreds of subsequent studies employed the basic emotion method with forced choice

Barrett employs ‘research avalanche’ as a purely bibliometric metaphor for the overwhelming proliferation of studies built on a methodologically flawed foundation, with no depth-psychological resonance.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside

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