Pool

The Seba library treats Pool in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Moore, Thomas, Pollack, Rachel).

In the library 8 passages

he pressed forward and soon came to a circular pool, measuring ten to twelve feet across. It was a spring, and the crystal-clear water looked almost black in the dark shadows of the trees. In the middle of the pool there floated a pearly organism

Jung reads the circular pool discovered in a primeval-forest dream as the archetypal unconscious, its dark clarity and luminous inhabitant together constituting a ‘big dream’ that determines the dreamer’s scientific vocation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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In the second dream, he was in a wood and there were watercourses. He found a circular pool surrounded by dense undergrowth. In the pool, he saw a beautiful creature, a large radiolarian.

In Jung’s own formative biography, the circular pool holding a luminous radiolarian directly anticipates his later theoretical image of the unconscious as a dark, life-containing depth that resolves the conflict between his two personality-numbers.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

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They are in the pool, at the very source of identity. The cure for narcissism, certainly a way of caring for the soul, is to be open to these other images.

Moore reinterprets the Narcissus pool not as the site of pathological self-absorption but as a reservoir of alternative self-images that can dissolve rigid narcissism and restore the soul’s natural flexibility.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis

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in the centre was a lake or large pool. A few street lamps just lit up the pitch darkness, and I could see a little island in the pool. On it there was a single tree, a red-flowering magnolia, which miraculously stood in everlasting sunshine.

In Jung’s analysis of the Liverpool mandala dream, the central pool is the still unconscious ground from which the self — figured as a miraculously lit flowering tree — rises as an autonomous centre of psychic wholeness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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The pool of water, small though it is, represents the unconscious; that same water we saw concealed behind the pillars of the High Priestess. Now this universal life energy has been stirred up by the act of pouring the person’s own life waters into it.

Pollack’s Tarot commentary identifies the Star card’s pool explicitly with the unconscious and with the universal life-energy that is activated when the individual consciously contributes personal vitality to the deeper collective ground.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting

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Narcissus lies at the edge of the pool tormented by the realization that this boy in the water is separated from him by the thinnest membrane.

Moore emphasises that the pool places the ego in agonising proximity to the psychic other, its reflective surface simultaneously revealing and withholding the deeper self that cannot be seized by force.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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Not far from the Styx is a grotto where, legend has it, the daughters of Proitos went into hiding when they were possessed by the frenzied delirium of mania. It was here that Melampos came and found them, to cleanse their defilement with secret purifying rites

Vernant documents the ancient Greek alignment of dangerous sacred waters with madness and purification, providing the mythological substrate within which depth psychology’s pool symbolism is grounded.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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