The Seba library treats Cellar in 4 passages, across 4 authors (including Jung, C.G., Jung, Carl Gustav, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D).
I thought of the conscious as of a room above, with the unconscious as a cellar underneath and then the earth wellspring, that is, the body, sending up the instincts.
Jung presents the cellar as the foundational spatial metaphor for his early topography of the psyche, positioning the unconscious structurally below conscious life and above the instinctual body.
, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989thesis
the long uninhabited ground floor in medieval style, then the Roman cellar, and finally the prehistoric cave. These signified past times and passed stages of consciousness.
Jung interprets the descending levels of his archetypal house-dream as stratigraphic layers of consciousness, with the Roman cellar representing a historically deep, pre-personal psychic layer.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis
dragged her down the hall and into the cellar till they were before the terrible door. Bluebeard merely looked at the door
In Estés’s amplification of the Bluebeard tale, the cellar functions as the site of the psyche’s most dreaded and forbidden knowledge, the threshold before which the predator’s power is most concentrated.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
might have been lost forever, confined and convulsing in his cellar room, had he not ‘blown up’ violently very recently
Sacks uses the cellar as a literal site of confinement and social invisibility, evoking its cultural resonance as a space of exclusion and suppressed potential.
, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985supporting