The Seba library treats Chasm in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including Yalom, Irvin D., Clarke, J. J., Jung, Carl Gustav).
"The chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life..." No one has said it more clearly. The defense, if successful, shields the individual from the knowledge of the chasm.
Yalom deploys the chasm as the existential void exposed when defensive self-deception collapses, identifying it with life itself as the terrifying truth midlife confronts.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
to foster a dualistic outlook by creating a fundamental chasm between mankind on the one hand and the divinity on the other... Modern man has, according to Jung, widened this chasm through the development of science and technology.
Clarke presents the chasm as the defining structural wound of Western modernity — the severance between humanity and divinity progressively deepened by Christian dualism and scientific rationalism.
, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994thesis
money-offerings were thrown every year into the lacus Curtius, formerly a chasm that had been closed through the sacrificial death of Curtius. He was the hero who went down to the underworld in order to conquer the danger that threatened the Roman state after the opening of the chasm.
Jung reads the Roman lacus Curtius as a mythological chasm requiring heroic sacrificial descent, linking the opening and ritual closure of the abyss to the archetype of the katabasis.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
it is also incorrect to state that a patient does not move because he is afraid of falling into a hallucinatory chasm. Immobility and the image of the chasm are parallel phenomena.
Bleuler reframes the hallucinatory chasm in schizophrenia not as a cause of motor immobility but as a co-occurring psychic expression, insisting on the coordinate rather than causal relationship of symptom clusters.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
Gaia is stability... When Gaia makes her appearance immediately after Chaos, a kind of basis, a foundation, is established in the unorganized world... Chaos still constitutes a threat lurking in the background.
Vernant reads the cosmogonic Chaos as a primordial chasm-force that precedes and permanently threatens all ordered, stable reality, never fully neutralised even after Zeus establishes cosmic hierarchy.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
only in the region of danger (watery abyss, cavern, forest, island, castle, etc.) can one find the 'treasure hard to attain' (jewel, virgin, life-potion, victory over death).
Jung articulates the abyss as the necessary threshold of danger in the hero's descent, the site where transformative treasure becomes accessible — a structural equivalent of the chasm as passage.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
In their apparent nature the two are opposed; each is the reverse of the other. The divine is infinite and immortal being; the human is life limited in time and scope and form.
Aurobindo articulates a metaphysical gulf between divine and human principles that, while not naming a chasm explicitly, instantiates the same structural divide Clarke identifies in Jung's critique of Western dualism.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948aside