Iceberg

If we imagine that the iceberg is completely under the water at the beginning, then this image would represent the state of complete unconsciousness at the start of life. When the tip of the ice slowly pushes itself upward, this corresponds to the wonderful awakening of the ego consciousness.

Banzhaf uses the iceberg as a developmental map, with the submerged mass representing primordial unconsciousness and the emergent tip tracing the progressive awakening of ego-identity through the stages of individuation.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000thesis

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the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma. Anxiety and despair can become a creative wellspring when we allow ourselves to experience bodily sensat

Levine reconceives the iceberg as frozen somatic trauma, arguing that the body’s innate healing capacity can thaw this immobilized energy and transform anxiety into creative vitality.

Levine, Peter A., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis

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the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma. Anxiety and despair can become a creative wellspring when we allow ourselves to experience bodily sensat

A parallel edition of Levine’s somatic formulation, affirming that deeply frozen trauma constitutes a psychophysical iceberg dissolved through embodied therapeutic process.

Levine, Peter A., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis

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Your anger with a friend, for instance, is but the tip of an iceberg — which is a more global sense of frustration in your relationship with him. This larger ‘iceberg’ is wider and deeper than your anger and can be experienced as a felt sense in the body.

Welwood, drawing on Gendlin, uses the iceberg to distinguish named surface emotions from the broader, bodily felt sense that subtends and exceeds them.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis

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A disproportionately strong emotional reaction — what one group member called ‘A Big Feeling’ — may be the tip of an iceberg of deeper, historical concerns that get reactivated in the present.

Yalom employs the iceberg clinically to explain how disproportionate group-therapeutic reactions signal historically embedded material surfacing beneath the presenting stimulus.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting

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trouble with friends is only the tip of the iceberg — the outer manifestation of something which he, himself, is responsible for creating. His difficulty relating with companions is the surface manifestation of something much deeper: his fear of expanding his boundaries.

Sasportas deploys the iceberg astrologically to argue that interpersonal symptoms are surface expressions of deep intrapsychic structures the individual is unconsciously generating.

Sasportas, Howard, The Twelve Houses: An Introduction to the Houses in Astrological Interpretation, 1985supporting

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While it is a self-protective mechanism, it is hard on the soul-psyche, for the soul does not respond to iciness, but rather warmth. An icy attitude will put out a woman’s creative fire.

Estés treats psychic freezing — analogous to the iceberg’s frozenness — as a defensive posture that extinguishes creative and soul-fire, requiring warmth and thawing to restore vitality.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside

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