Dragon Fight

The dragon fight is the central structural motif Neumann identifies within the hero myth. “The dragon fight has three main components: the hero, the dragon, and the treasure. By vanquishing the dragon the hero gains the treasure, which is the end product of the process symbolized by the fight” (Neumann 2019, p. 152). The dragon, Neumann clarifies, bears the marks of the uroboros: it is masculine and feminine at once, so the fight is never with a single parent but with the primordial First-Parent unity. “The fight with the dragon is thus the fight with the First Parents, a fight in which the murders of both father and mother, but not of one alone, have their ritually prescribed place” (ibid.).

Against Freud’s personalistic construal of the hero as the son who kills his father to possess his mother, Neumann insists on the transpersonal reading Jung had already seen: “the hero’s fight is the fight with a mother who cannot be regarded as a personal figure in the family romance. Behind the personal figure of the mother there stands… what Jung was later to call the mother archetype” (Neumann 2019, p. 154). The dragon fight is therefore the structural moment at which the emerging ego of the hero-myth wrests itself from the neumann-great-mother and from the uroboric matrix both, and the process by which it does so is the process by which consciousness itself is constituted.

Neumann distinguishes stages within the fight — the slaying of the mother, the slaying of the father — which together accomplish the differentiation of the ego from the unconscious. The fight yields the treasure-hard-to-attain: the captive freed, the pearl, the water of life. Each stage of the fight is at once mythological image and psychological operation.

Relationships

• hero-myth
• uroboros
• neumann-great-mother
• separation-of-the-world-parents
• treasure-hard-to-attain
• erich-neumann

Primary sources

• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)