Centroversion

Centroversion is Neumann‘s name for “the innate tendency of a whole to create unity within its parts and to synthesize their differences in unified systems” (Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness). It operates at every level of psychic development: at the biological level as the self-regulating coherence of the organism (from the amoeba to the higher animals); at the early psychic level as the diffuse unity of the uroboric stage in which ego-consciousness has not yet separated; at the mature psychic level as the pull toward the Self as the psychic center.

“Centroversion is the innate tendency of a whole to create unity within its parts and to synthesize their differences in unified systems. The unity of the whole is maintained by compensatory processes controlled by centroversion, with whose help the whole becomes a self-creative, expanding system. At a later stage centroversion manifests itself as a directive center, with the ego as the center of consciousness and the self as the psychic center.” (Neumann, Origins, “Centroversion in Organisms on the Uroboric Level”)

The concept is Neumann’s attempt to supply Jung’s static structural account of the psyche with a developmental axis. Centroversion is what makes the emergence of ego-consciousness from the collective unconscious intelligible as a process rather than a miracle. In the earliest phase, centroversion functions “as the entelechy principle in biology” — the organism’s tendency toward organic coherence. Later it differentiates into the psychological axis along which the ego forms. The ego is, in this sense, not an alien imposition on the instinctual ground but its own highest flowering — “the central position of the ego rightly emphasizes” itself because the ego is the organ centroversion has built for consciousness (Neumann, Origins).

The concept is load-bearing for Neumann’s whole genetic psychology. Without centroversion, the collective unconscious would be a ground from which nothing could rise; with it, the emergence of the ego and ultimately of the Self is the collective unconscious’s own tendency toward differentiated wholeness.

Relationships

Primary sources

neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann, 1949, Part II)