Glass Coffin

if Snow White is imprisoned in a glass coffin, she is shut off from life as far as feeling, but not as far as awareness, is concerned. If you are in a glass house, you can see and be aware of everything that goes on outside, but you are cut off from the smells, the temperature, the wind

Von Franz establishes the glass coffin as the paradigmatic symbol of an intellectual system that preserves awareness while severing the feeling function and all sensory relatedness to life.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970thesis

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glass is a substance which can be seen through, but which is a very bad conductor of warmth. One could say that it has to do with the intellect; that it represents an intellectual system which makes one able to see through something but which cuts off the feeling relationship.

A parallel formulation confirming von Franz’s core thesis: glass symbolizes intellect as penetrating vision that simultaneously insulates against warmth, feeling, and genuine relationship.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970thesis

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imprisoned in a glass coffin is not in touch with her passion for life. She stands outside looking in, yearning for what other people take for granted. From her prison, the tiniest details of living take on a mystical beauty. In her aloneness, she fantasizes her emotions, but she has no “I” with which to experience real feeling.

Woodman translates the glass coffin into clinical description of the father-bound ‘anima woman’: exquisitely perceptive, aesthetically alive, yet unable to embody genuine affect or autonomous selfhood.

Woodman, Marion, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982thesis

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she cited Snow White, who lay enclosed in a glass coffin, in the sleep of death. It is not difficult to see that Snow White belongs to the same cycle of myths as Sleeping Beauty. It contains even clearer indications of the myth of the seasons.

Jung positions Snow White’s glass coffin within the seasonal myth cycle — the earth held by winter’s cold awaiting spring’s liberation — establishing an archetypal-mythological frame for the image.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961thesis

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the chief feature of glass is its transparency. Glass itself is invisible and there’s something miraculous about it… it is invisible, and by virtue of its invisibility one can see things through it. So it’s a symbol of a certain kind of consciousness.

Edinger elaborates the symbolic properties of glass — its paradoxical invisibility-through-transparency — as the foundation for understanding glass-based imagery including the coffin as a form of consciousness-symbolism in dreams and alchemy.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting

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she also saw “dismembered children in glass coffins”

Jung cites a psychotic patient’s imagery of dismembered children in glass coffins within the context of sun-myth and the dismemberment-reassembly cycle, linking the glass coffin to motifs of death, fragmentation, and potential reconstitution.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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Behind him there was only one passenger seat, as in the smallest aircraft. But there in that passenger seat was a coffin full of rattling bones. One half of his personality had been killed by the mother.

Von Franz uses a dream coffin image to describe mother-complex arrest — not the glass coffin specifically, but closely related psychodynamics of suspended vitality awaiting resurrection.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997aside

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this imprisonment in a coffin, or in an alchemical vessel, would represent a process of suffocation, the death of the prima materia by suffocation.

Von Franz traces the alchemical parallel to coffin imagery — imprisonment as the necessary death of prima materia — providing the transformative-alchemical context within which the glass coffin’s arrest-and-potential-awakening structure operates.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980aside

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