Matriarchal Consciousness

In The Great Mother, Neumann introduces a structural contrast between matriarchal and patriarchal consciousness that he reads not as historical epochs but as persistent levels of the psyche. “By way of simplification we correlate the sun with the patriarchal consciousness and the moon with the matriarchal consciousness” (Neumann 1955, p. 55). Patriarchal consciousness proceeds by abstraction, distinction, and the removal of spirit from matter; matriarchal consciousness keeps the spiritual embedded in the earthly and the material, and is therefore not “merely of the soul” as the patriarchate judges it but carries its own wisdom and light (Neumann 1955, p. 55).

Neumann inherits the distinction from Johann Jakob johann-jakob-bachofen‘s Mutterrecht, but he reads it symbolically rather than historically. Jung’s programmatic statement, which Neumann makes the hinge of his own method, is explicit: “as soon as you read the tellurian region as the unconscious and oppose it to the uranian region of consciousness, all of his findings — interpreted symbolically and not historically — gain a new and highly modern significance” (Jung, quoted in Liebscher’s foreword to Neumann 1955). What is recovered is therefore not the historical existence of an ancient matriarchate but the neumann-great-mother as a structural level in the psyche.

Neumann insists that matriarchal consciousness is “a level of the feminine psyche that we still encounter among modern women” (Neumann 1955, ch. 15). The concept anchors his distinctive contribution: that depth psychology needs a phenomenology of feminine consciousness that does not derive it from, or measure it against, patriarchal consciousness.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• elementary-and-transformative-character
• johann-jakob-bachofen
• feminine-individuation
• conscious-feminine
• erich-neumann

Primary sources

• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)