The Seba library treats Ice in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Carson, Anne).
the urge to warm the cold and melt the ice (oppositionalism again) reflects a therapeutic effort that has not been able to meet the ice at its own level.
Hillman argues that the therapeutic impulse to melt ice is itself a failure of depth, and that ice as a psychic region — linked etymologically to psyche and the refrigeration of the soul — must be met on its own terms.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
The nekyia into Hell's ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself.
Hillman contends that engagement with the archetypal Ninth Circle — Cain, Judas, Lucifer — requires a cold psychological eye, not charitable warmth, applying the homeopathic principle to the icy depths of the psyche.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
Like the duckling who becomes frozen in the ice of the pond, they freeze up. Freezing up is the worst thing a person can do. Coldness is the kiss of death to creativity, relationship, life itself.
Estés reads ice as the symbol of pathological emotional shutdown in women, a defensive condition that extinguishes creative fire and demands active breaking of the freeze for psychological renewal.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The very bottom of hell, according to Dante, is a realm of ice, inhabited by the archcriminals Cain, Judas, and Lucifer. The psychological trait that goes with the iced heart is rigidity, an incapacity to yield, to flow, to let go.
Hillman maps Hitler's self-described ice-cold heart onto Dante's infernal ice, arguing that glacial rigidity is the defining psychological signature of radical evil.
, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The dark ice man figure from the world of mythos has the same uncanny appearance/disappearance mystique as complexes in the human psyche, as well as the same modus operandi as the Devil in this tale.
Estés deploys the Icelandic figure of Brak the ice man as a mythic image for the autonomous complex — lethal, invisible, leaving no trace — that ambushes and dissolves the soul's mission.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Now, as you peer down through concentric circles of time, you see at the heart of the poem a piece of ice, melting.
Carson identifies a melting piece of ice as the concentrated image at the structural center of Sappho's erotic poem, embodying desire as simultaneously transient and repetitive.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986supporting
The liquid kind is composed of the small and unequal particles of water; and moves itself and is moved by other bodies owing to the want of uniformity... whereas the fusile kind, being formed of large and uniform particles, is more stable than the other.
Plato's Timaeus provides a cosmological account of water's solid and liquid states as functions of particle size and uniformity, offering the philosophical substrate for later symbolic treatments of ice as rigidity and fixity.
, Timaeus, -360aside
Thereupon he went to the ice and whacked away at it for quite a while. He filled his bag with ice and brought it back. Then he put a kettle on the fire and poured the ice into it.
In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, ice functions as a comic element in the trickster's imitative deception, illustrating the absurdity of mimicry without understanding.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside
a series of Ice Ages was set in motion. The accompanying hardships served as a powerful force for the emergence of deeper thoughts.
Panksepp invokes the Ice Ages as an evolutionary pressure that drove the expansion of human brain capacity and the capacity for complex thought.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998aside