Bucket

The next person that comes round here, with drugs, for drugs or anything to do with drugs, they’ll get this bucket of water over their head.’ It happened to be Terry Blackwell and I tipped this bucket over him. It had come to such a stage in my head — I was frightened, terrified.

The bucket here functions as an instrument of psychic boundary-setting, its physical deployment marking the precise moment of an addict’s inner turning — a concrete enactment of the ego’s assertion of self-protective limits.

Addenbrooke, Mary, Survivors of Addiction: Narratives of Recovery, 2011thesis

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I conceived of ‘space’ in rather literal, physical terms, as a big, dark, empty bucket. Instead, ‘space’ is a theoretical idea — a concept — not a concrete, fixed entity; space is always computed in relation to something else.

Barrett uses the image of the bucket to illustrate the essentialist cognitive error of treating abstract concepts as bounded, thing-like containers — a critique directly relevant to reductive models of mind and emotion.

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

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hawkheaded and broad-winged, they may be seen following around behind a king, with a cone which has been dipped in a small pail, as in a wall carving of Assurnasirpal in the ninth century B.C., a scene like the anointing of baptism.

Jaynes’s passing reference to the ritual pail in Assyrian iconography situates vessel-imagery within the archaeology of divine mediation, linking the container motif to ancient practices of sacred transmission.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside

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