Primary Relationship

The primary relationship (Neumann’s Urbeziehung) is the mother-child bond through which, in Neumann’s theory, the self is first experienced. Edinger summarizes the claim: “Neumann has suggested that the Self may be experienced in childhood in relation to the parents, initially the mother. Neumann calls this original mother-child relationship the primary relationship” (Edinger 1972, p. 39). Neumann’s own formulation is quoted by Samuels: the self “cannot emerge without a concrete parent-child relationship to function as a ‘personal evocation of the archetype’” (Neumann 1959, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 93). The child projects the self onto the parent, and the ego-self-axis is initiated within that projective field.

Neumann extends the thesis in a strong form that Samuels records as decisive for the post-Jungian debate: “the development of the later ego-Self axis of the psyche and the communication and opposition between ego and Self are initiated by the relationship between mother as Self and the child as ego” (Neumann 1973, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 93). The claim that the mother functions as the baby’s self draws objection from Michael Fordham on logical grounds — if the mother is the baby’s self there is no baby, or no mother — and the resulting debate is among the central rapprochements between post-Jungian and psychoanalytic object-relations theorizing about infancy (Samuels 1985, p. 93).

The primary relationship is, for Neumann, the germ from which every later ego-self dynamic unfolds. Damage within it produces the alienation from the self Edinger calls ego-self alienation; its intactness is the substrate on which individuation later becomes possible.

Relationships

• ego-self-axis
• self
• neumann-great-mother
• edward-edinger
• erich-neumann
• andrew-samuels

Primary sources

• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)
• samuels-jung-postjungians (Samuels 1985)