The Seba library treats Broken in 9 passages, across 9 authors (including Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, Russell, Dick, Klein, Melanie).
the weak and the broken do have much to give—they can heal us because they tap the well of our own brokenness… He is so broken that I am allowed to look at my own brokenness without being ashamed.
Kurtz and Ketcham argue, through Vanier’s testimony, that brokenness functions as a mutual mirror—the visibly broken person grants others permission to acknowledge their own hidden woundedness without shame.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis
they were not as broken in the same way. And I didn’t feel as therapeutic toward these more conventional types… ‘WHAT WE ARE ABOUT IS THE BROKEN HEART.’—James Hillman.
Hillman explicitly names the broken heart as the orienting concern of authentic depth-psychological work, distinguishing it from the more comfortable therapeutic engagement offered to the conventionally intact.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023thesis
already at an earlier stage the child had shown outspoken anxiety about broken things… his distress on such occasions was an indication of both persecutory and depressive anxiety.
Klein reads the infant’s intense distress before broken objects as a symbolic indicator of underlying anxieties about the destruction of the maternal breast and body, linking the external broken thing to internal object-relations dynamics.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises. A body who has lived a long time accumulates debris. It cannot be avoided.
Estés frames accumulated brokenness as an inevitable existential residue of mid-life, positioning it as the precipitating crisis that forces a decisive psychic choice between bitterness and instinctual renewal.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The rippling pond with its waves reflects images that are broken. They come and go, come and go, come and go… What we do is identify ourselves with one of those bro[ken images].
Campbell uses the image of broken reflections on a wind-rippled pond to illustrate maya—the mind’s active, distorting movement that fragments reality into partial and shifting identifications.
, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990supporting
the Eighty-ninth Psalm pictured that covenant as broken… I will not break my covenant, I will not revoke my given word.
Edinger invokes the broken divine covenant in Psalm 89 as a pivotal theological and psychological rupture that drives the transformation of the God-image in Jung’s Answer to Job.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting
in cases of prolonged death agony, one or more boards are removed from the roof, or the roof is even broken… the soul will more easily quit its body if the other image of body-cosmos, the house, is broken open above.
Eliade documents ritual breaking of the house-roof as a cross-cultural symbolic act enabling the soul’s departure, linking the broken structure to transcendence of the human condition.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
He tells me about this in broken fragments, as if it is too painful to explain clearly.
Hari employs ‘broken fragments’ as a phenomenological description of traumatized narrative—the fractured syntax of testimony as an index of psychic devastation that resists coherent articulation.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
the sword-blade three times broken and four times broken fell from his hand’s grip.
Lattimore’s Iliad renders the broken sword in battle as a moment of martial impotence, functioning within the corpus as a literary archetype of the failure of force against a divinely protected figure.
, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside