Learning to Swim

The Awakening, the Unconscious, and the Call of the Depths

My son is terrified of the water. 

Each time he steps in, his small back tenses, his teeth clench, his lip quivers. Last summer, he taught himself to traverse the entire perimeter of the pool by clinging to its border—inch by painstaking inch—rather than daring to float across its risky middle. His fingertips press white against the rough surface, leaving marks on the pool’s edge—little, damp prints that fade almost as quickly as they appear. Marking not just the boundary between concrete and water, but between the known and unknown.

We recognize these hesitations in our own lives, these moments of gripping onto what we know. The morning commute that follows the same careful route, the conversations that stay safely in the shallows, the dreams we keep tucked away like winter clothes in summer closets. 

C.G. Jung understood this when he wrote of the sea as “the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface.” We spend our early years building lives on the safety of its shore—careers, marriages, reputations constructed grain by grain like careful sandcastles. Near the coast, we learn to navigate the familiar rhythms of our days, keeping our feet firmly planted in the sand of social convention. But there comes a moment—what Jung called the onset of individuation—when the shallows no longer satisfy, when the glimmer of deeper waters beckons us to wade past the familiar and toward the vastness of our own uncharted depths. 

The timeless journey of self-discovery and transformation is nowhere more poignantly illuminated than in the story of Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. On the surface, her life in 19th-century New Orleans was complete—a successful husband, beautiful children, a life cushioned by wealth and propriety. Yet beneath that carefully maintained facade, something stirred in her, moving her "to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to...shadowy anguish." 

Psychotherapy, from its Greek roots, means "listening to soul"—a practice Jungian analyst James Hollis suggests we have forgotten in our rush to silence symptoms. Our depression, anxiety, the nameless restlessness that keeps us awake at night—these are often messages from the depths, calling us toward a larger life. 

For Edna, this call comes from the "distant, restless water," pulling her toward depths she both fears and longs to explore. Initially, "a certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water, unless there was a hand nearby that might reach out and reassure her." One night, emboldened by Robert—the lover who stirs her awakening—she plunges into the dark water. "As she swam," Chopin writes, "she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself."

Yet the path inward bends like a coastline, neither straight nor simple. Even in her most courageous moments, Edna looks back toward the shore—toward the life and people she's leaving behind. That familiar stretch of beach now seems distant, unreachable.

Still she persists, because she must. 

Her search leads to reckless experiments—betting at the horse races, a careless affair with Alcée Arobin, hours lost in painting and music that moves her to unexpected tears. Through it all, the sea keeps calling: “She could hear...the ripple of the water, the flapping sail, the glint of the moon upon the bay." Like a swimmer shedding heavy clothes, she gradually strips away "that fictitious self which we assume like a garment to appear before the world." What lies beneath remains a mystery, even to her, but she can no longer ignore its call.

I watch my son learn to swim with that same mixture of terror and wonder. Week by week, his small acts of courage accumulate: first the willingness to dip his head beneath the pool's glassy surface, then the trust to kick his legs while clinging to a foam float. The instructor stands nearby, a scaffold between concrete certainty and uncertain depths. Then one day, in what feels like a small miracle, he lets his body lean back, surrendering to the water's hold. For a moment, he floats, suspended between trust and fear, his little body testing the boundary between what he knows and what he might become.

James Hollis calls these waters the "swamplands of the soul"—those murky depths where our carefully constructed identities begin to dissolve. Like my son in his swimming lessons, like Edna in her quiet rebellions, we all reach a point where the shallow end no longer serves us, where the strategies and adaptations that kept us safely afloat in the first half of life begin to fail. This calling to the depths appears in ordinary moments: in dreams that wake us at 3am, insisting on being heard; in the sudden hollowness we feel after achieving everything we thought we wanted; in relationships that no longer fit who we're becoming; in the work that once sustained us now feeling empty of meaning. 

The water grows deeper, darker. We find ourselves asking questions that have no easy answer: Who am I beneath these roles I play? What does my soul ask of me?

The temptation is always to retreat, to return to solid ground. But growth, Hollis reminds us, requires leaning into these uncomfortable places, trusting that our symptoms of discord—the depression, the restlessness, the nagging sense of something more—are not merely afflictions to be cured, but invitations to go deeper.

In the end, Edna stands naked before the endless horizon, "at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her." The stripping away is both literal and profound—all the garments of society falling away until she stands as elemental as the dawn. "How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky!" she reflects, "how delicious!" In this moment, she is both lost and found, "like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known." She steps into the sea one final time, "thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end." Like a child before she knows fear, before boundaries, she returns to that first morning of the world, when every horizon stretched endless with possibility.

The call to deeper waters comes to us again and again throughout our lives. Sometimes it arrives as a whisper, a subtle discontent with the familiar currents of our days. Other times it crashes like a wave, upending everything we thought we knew about ourselves. Each time, we must choose anew: whether to cling to the familiar edge or to release our grip, to trust the water's hold.

Those small, damp fingerprints in the concrete appear less often now and fade more quickly. I watch my son venturing from the pool’s border and think of all the deeper waters that await him. Like Edna, like myself, like all of us navigating the vast seas of our own becoming, he will face currents that threaten to pull him under, horizons that seem impossibly distant. Yet I find comfort in knowing this is the ancient journey of human consciousness—the gradual release of the familiar shore, the tentative venture into uncharted depths. 

My hope for him—for all of us—is that we trust our own buoyancy, even when we cannot see the opposite shore.