The Seba library treats Pond in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Hollis, James, Campbell, Joseph).
the prince had to keep his head dipped down into the milk right in the middle of the pond. He had always to swim close to the innermost center, which is beyond the problem of good and evil
Von Franz reads the milk-pond as an archetypal field in which immersion at the centre — refusing to look outward — constitutes the only defensible attitude when confronted with evil.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
One pond is clear, representing the healthy, healing encounter with the unconscious, but for the moment Robert is nearly drowning in the other.
Hollis uses the two contrasting ponds of a patient’s dream to demonstrate how a primal complex reproduces its toxic atmosphere within new relationships, constricting imaginative possibility.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
The image is given of a pond rippled by a wind. The rippling pond with its waves reflects images that are broken. They come and go, come and go, come and go.
Campbell deploys the rippled pond as a cosmological and yogic metaphor for the mind agitated by maya, whose stilling is the precondition for undistorted self-knowledge.
, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990thesis
She said she would turn herself into a big pond of milk. He must be a duck and always swim right in the middle and keep his head under the milk and never look out
Von Franz presents the fairy-tale transformation of a woman into a protective pond as the narrative matrix from which her analysis of evil, projection, and the centred psyche proceeds.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
the ugly duckling who floated there stretched his wings. How strong and big his wings were. They lifted him high over the land. From the air he saw the orchards in their white gowns
Estés situates the pond as a liminal refuge and threshold of transformation in the ugly duckling mythos, the site where nascent identity gathers strength before emergence.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
he struggled on till he came to another pond, then another house, another pond, another house, and the entire winter was spent this way, alternating between life and death.
Estés frames the repeated encounter with ponds across the ugly duckling’s winter ordeal as a pattern of oscillation between annihilation and survival that characterises the soul’s developmental journey.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
the moon-maiden takes refuge in a pond after her sun-moon marriage, disappears in it, and goes on living as a pig with her child
Jung and Kerényi record a mythologem in which the pond functions as a place of disappearance and underground continuity for the lunar feminine, connecting pond imagery to chthonic regeneration.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
the tailor saw on a pond two little ducks. He caught one and wanted to wring its neck to have something to eat. But the old duck swam out of the bushes and implored him
Von Franz notes the pond as a setting for a conventional fairy-tale moment of compassionate restraint, tangentially illustrating how water-sites host encounters that test moral character.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside