The term ‘Tent’ appears across the depth-psychology corpus not as a mere physical structure but as a polyvalent symbol articulating the relationship between bounded human existence and the sacred or psychological infinite. Its most theologically charged appearances invoke the Hebrew tabernacle — the Tent of Meeting — as the archetypal dwelling-place wherein the divine condescends to share mortal homelessness, a motif Karen Armstrong traces through the priestly tradition and Edinger reads as a symbolic staging of the ego’s encounter with the Self through sacrificial mediation. The tent as temenos, a contained but permeable sacred space, recurs in oneiric material: Welwood’s dream of a huge tent with a high roof figures the psyche’s own structure, in which earthly frameworks are permeated by ‘vast reaches of open space,’ a image directly serviceable to depth-psychological accounts of the interplay between ego-structure and transpersonal ground. In more clinical registers, the tent becomes a site of confinement, surveillance, and stripped dignity — Hari’s Tent City prison passages — or, in Vaughan-Lee’s Sufi dreamwork, the circus tent sheltering the Great Goddess around a central post, a classic axis mundi configuration. Alcoholics Anonymous literature employs the term metaphorically as radical inclusion. The convergence of these registers — sacred shelter, psychological container, instrument of humiliation or exclusion — makes ‘Tent’ a surprisingly rich indicator of the corpus’s broader preoccupations with containment, liminality, and the conditions under which transformation becomes possible.
I was in a huge tent with a high roof in which a lot of activity and celebration was going on… the structure of the tent was necessary to keep
Welwood uses a personal dream of a vast, high-roofed tent to figure the psyche’s essential structure: bounded earthly frameworks simultaneously permeated by open transpersonal space, making the tent a symbol of the ego-Self container.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
the portable shrine in which God had ‘set up his tent’ (shakan) with his people and shared their homelessness… the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness, P drew upon the old mythology.
Armstrong identifies the Israelite Tent of Meeting as the priestly tradition’s archetypal symbol of divine immanence — God sharing human nomadic precarity — whose architectural instructions encode a cosmological mythology of sacred dwelling.
, A History of God, 1993thesis
A tabernacle tent is put up and after arrangements are made, the tabernacle erected, the outer holy place and the Inner Holy of Holies, the priests go into the outside tent every day to perform their duties, but only the High Priest goes into the inside tent.
Edinger reads the Hebrews account of the two-chambered tabernacle tent as a graduated sacrificial topography mapping the ego’s differentiated access to the Self, with the innermost sanctum accessible only through supreme mediation.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis
I am in a circus, in the arena. There is a central post which holds up the tent. Many people are moving around the post, like in a merry-go-round.
In a Sufi dreamwork context, Vaughan-Lee presents a dreamer’s vision of a circus tent with a central supporting post as an axis mundi configuration through which the Great Goddess manifests, linking the tent to collective sacred space and the numinous feminine.
, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992supporting
Bill continually worked to make A. A. into a bigger tent—and then one even bigger than that: a tent that increasingly embraced those who, for whatever reason, had previously been excluded from membership.
Schaberg employs the tent metaphorically to describe Bill Wilson’s therapeutic-spiritual vision of radical inclusion within Alcoholics Anonymous, where the expandable shelter becomes an image of an ever-widening container of belonging.
, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019supporting
I assume I will get no more information from Tent City. But—to my surprise—when I ask to see the Hole, the officers agree to show me.
Hari’s account of ‘Tent City’ prison inverts the tent’s symbolic shelter into a site of enforced exposure, surveillance, and the systematic stripping of dignity, functioning as the shadow-face of the sacred container.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
The doctors have told her it is an allergic reaction to the bleach they use in the tents, she says, but there is no alternative for her.
Hari’s depiction of women imprisoned in toxic tents literalizes the pathological container — a shelter that injures rather than protects — illustrating the shadow dimension of institutional enclosure.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
Within the camp, a refugee has choices: he can leave his tent or stay inside it. If he leaves it, he can be friendly and kind toward his neighbors.
Harris uses the refugee tent as a clinical metaphor for the irreducible sphere of agency within radical constraint, illustrating ACT’s thesis that intentional action remains possible even within the most bounded existential containers.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
I found myself staggering up to Rev. ——‘s Holiness tent—and as it was full of seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and some shouting
James’s conversion testimony situates the revivalist ‘Holiness tent’ as a liminal container of collective religious ecstasy, in which the boundaries of ordinary selfhood dissolve under the pressure of communal fervour.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside
ladies with bells on their bridles riding in circles around the king’s tent. The ranks parted and the messengers, admitted, saw the king on a couch beneath a canopy
Campbell’s Arthurian passage places the king’s tent at the ceremonial centre of a military-courtly cosmos, functioning as a portable temenos marking sovereign power and the axis of chivalric order.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968aside