Swallow

The Seba library treats Swallow in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Yalom, Irvin D., Signell, Karen A., Bly, Robert).

In the library 7 passages

Swallowing became difficult; gradually she shifted to soft foods, then to pureed foods, then to liquids. One day in a cafeteria, after having been unable even to swallow some clear broth, she looked around at the other diners and wondered, ‘Do they realize how lucky they are to be able to swallow?’

The progressive loss of the ability to swallow, in a patient with esophageal cancer, becomes the existential trigger for a radical revaluation of ordinary life and a confrontation with mortality.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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A woman, whom I’ll call Sarah, had the following dream about dealing with subtle aggression: Swallowing the Needle. While I’m eating, I find a threaded

The dream image of swallowing a needle encodes a woman’s unconscious incorporation of aggression directed toward her, linking alimentary imagery to the psychodynamics of suppressed response to interpersonal hostility.

Signell, Karen A., Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991thesis

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what we needed to help us in the nation was not someone like Adlai Stevenson, who was too much like a swallow, or Bertrand Russell, who had too much light in his personality. Even Eugene McCarthy later on, who had a little more of the dark side, seemed to me a swallow, unable to find mud.

The swallow is deployed as an archetype of excessive lightness and insufficient shadow, illustrating Bly’s Jungian argument that politically effective personalities require the integration of darkness.

Bly, Robert, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988thesis

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this relationship called no man’s land (l’entre-deux-morts) which is not as I might say, all the same in itself so difficult to swallow, because it means nothing other than the fact that there is not for man a coincidence between the two frontiers which refer to this death.

Lacan uses ‘difficult to swallow’ as a rhetorical figure for the resistance that a topological concept of desire—the space between two deaths—presents to ordinary comprehension.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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AU�W [v.] ‘to hiccup’ (Hp., Ar., Arist.). ← IE *sluklg- ‘swallow’. DER AUYflOe; ‘swallowing’ (Hp., Arist., Nic.)

The etymological entry traces the Greek verb for hiccupping to an Indo-European root meaning ‘to swallow,’ revealing the archaic linguistic unity of involuntary oral and digestive acts.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting

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first and foremost you should watch the birds who are so near the heavenly signs, the teipea, and who must know more than man. This watching of the birds we are accustomed to call the ‘science of augury’

Harrison’s account of augury as originally magical weather-making positions weather-birds, among them the swallow, as ritual agents whose observation shapes the human apprehension of cosmic time.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside

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