Ice
Feeling frozen; life held still.
Ice: what does it mean in analytical psychology?
Ice is water that has stopped: life held rigid, feeling frozen, and the cold at the far edge of the world. Jungian writers read it as a psyche locked in a fixed attitude, which must thaw before anything can grow.
Ice: where does it appear in myth and tradition?
The frozen lake of Cocytus at the bottom of Dante’s hell, the frost giants, Andersen’s Snow Queen (1844), where a splinter of glass freezes the boy’s heart.
From the Sources
Listening to the sailors, Zarathustra at last finds his tongue loosened, and the ice of his heart breaks.
“And behold! when listening, his own tongue was at last loosened, and the ice of his heart broke.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Third Part, XLVI, 'The Vision and the Enigma', section 1. Translated by Thomas Common (Project Gutenberg eBook #1998). The text, read in part
The Lord asks Job out of whose womb came the ice, when the waters are hidden as with a stone and the face of the deep is frozen.
“Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? 38:30 The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.”
The King James Version of the Bible, Job 38:29-30. Project Gutenberg eBook #10. The text, read in part
Each passage is quoted from the text named, which the press fetched and read, and was checked word for word against a fresh copy of it; the link opens that copy. Passages are given as printed, without the editors’ footnote numbers, and with words broken across lines joined.
Where to Read
- The Book of Symbols, Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (2010)
Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.
Related Symbols
Also among The Elements
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
Cite This Entry
“Ice.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/ice.
Nearby in the alphabet: The Horse: Instinctive force, which carries. The House: The structure of the psyche, lived in. Incubation: Sleeping in the sacred place to receive the healing dream. Initiation: The passage through a threshold into a new state.