The Seba library treats Trapeze in 5 passages, across 4 authors (including Dana, Deb, Porges, Stephen W., McGilchrist, Iain).
it is as if each is a trapeze artist in midflight. Having let go of the first trapeze and flying toward the next brings a moment of doubt. Will the bar appear? Will I be ready to grab it?
Dana deploys the trapeze-artist-in-midflight as the governing metaphor for the liminal, untethered experience clients undergo when actively repatterning the autonomic nervous system toward ventral vagal regulation.
, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018thesis
it is as if each is a trapeze artist in midflight. Having let go of the first trapeze and flying toward the next brings a moment of doubt. Will the bar appear? Will I be ready to grab it? Therapists accompany cl
An identical passage in Porges's foundational polyvagal text confirms that the trapeze metaphor is canonical within this tradition for describing the existential suspension of therapeutic transition.
, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis
does placing a maths professor in a circus troupe result in a flying mathematician, or a bunch of trapeze artists who can no longer perform unless they have first calculated the precise trajectory of their leap?
McGilchrist uses the inhibited trapeze artist as a paradigm case of how left-hemisphere analytic intrusion destroys embodied procedural competence, illustrating the neurological cost of misapplied reflective cognition.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
both the potentially creative (flying mathematicians) and the obviously disruptive effects (inhibited trapeze artists, see pp. 12–13) – could be explained by such intrusions
McGilchrist returns to the trapeze-artist figure to anchor a broader argument about interhemispheric inhibition failure, linking lateralisation anomalies to both creative and destructive functional outcomes.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
For a Jung man from Mexico, it was the trapeze artist and contortionist in the Cirque du Soleil.
Keltner cites the trapeze artist as a cross-cultural exemplar of skill-elicited awe, locating the figure within a phenomenology of wonder provoked by rare human physical virtuosity.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting