The Seba library treats Rhizome in 3 passages, across 2 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Stein, Murray).
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer.
Jung deploys the rhizome as his central metaphor for the psyche’s authentic being, locating true life in the invisible subterranean ground rather than in the ephemeral conscious existence visible above the surface.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis
rhizomata, 195 rhizome, 90
The index of *Alchemical Studies* places rhizome and rhizomata in explicit proximity to roots, the secret in the root of the tree, and the root of the self, situating the term within a dense network of alchemical-botanical symbolism.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting
For Jung, the self was rooted in flesh and blood, in the body. He soon decided on a more European two-story structure, but to him the structure still represented ‘the maternal hearth.’
Murray Stein’s account of the Bollingen Tower describes Jung’s effort to ground his self-image in physical, earthly, and instinctual existence — an architectural enactment of the same invisible-root principle the rhizome metaphor expresses.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998aside