The Seba library treats Floating in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Neumann, Erich, Freud, Sigmund, Levine, Peter A.).
a tiny, defenseless speck, enveloped and helplessly dependent, a little island floating on the vast expanse of the primal ocean… consciousness has not yet wrested any firm foothold from the flood of unconscious being
Neumann identifies floating as the defining condition of the uroboric, pre-ego state in which nascent consciousness is entirely engulfed by the unconscious and has no stable orientation.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
The second group of typical dreams included those dreamer flies or floats in the air, falls, swims, etc. What is th such dreams? It is impossible to give a general reply… it is only the ra sensations contained in them which is always derived fr source.
Freud classifies floating as a member of a canonical set of typical dreams whose common denominator is somatic sensation rather than uniform symbolic meaning, resisting fixed interpretation.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
the woman being raped, the soldier facing enemy fire, or the victim of an accident may experience a fundamental disconnection from his or her body. From a corner of the ceiling, a child may watch him/herself being molested
Levine frames floating—as out-of-body dissociation—as the organism’s innate response to life-threatening overwhelm, a departure from bodily felt-sense that constitutes the core of traumatic experience.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis
we may tacitly acknowledge the momentary absence of the felt sense by facetiously referring to ourselves or others as having been ‘spaced out,’ or ‘out to lunch.’ In other words, out of our bodies.
Levine maps colloquial language for dissociation onto the continuum of floating-as-somatic-absence, showing how everyday departures from embodied presence echo traumatic dissociation.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997supporting
the basis of the world is particles of divine fire, floating in space; groups of them form deities, vast beings of long life but not everlasting
Cicero’s account of Democritean cosmology employs floating as the primordial condition of fire-particles from which divine beings coalesce, mapping the image onto cosmogonic and theological territory.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
All was a mass, formless and eggshaped, the extent whereof is not known, which held the life principle. Thereafter the purer tenuous essence, ascending gradually, formed the Sky, the heavier portion sank and became the Earth.
Von Franz’s citation of Japanese creation mythology presents the undifferentiated, floating primordial mass as the pre-cosmogonic condition from which heaven and earth separate, paralleling Neumann’s uroboric imagery.
, Creation Myths, 1995aside