Transformation Stage (Osiris)

The third phase of the hero in Neumann’s scheme, distinct from the extraverted founder-liberator and the introverted culture-bringer. “The third type of hero” is the transformative figure whose work is “the creative act of raising the buried treasure” — the integration of the unconscious contents the heroic ego had previously to defeat. “The aim of the extraverted type of hero is action: he is the founder, leader, and liberator whose deeds change the face of the world. The introverted type is the culture-bringer, the redeemer and savior who discovers the inner values, exalting them as knowledge and wisdom, as a law and a faith, a work to be accomplished and an example to be followed” (Neumann 2019, par. 87).

The transformation stage belongs to the second half of life and is coordinated with the becoming-conscious of centroversion. Where the dragon-fight severs the ego from the Great Mother, the Osiris stage effects a new, differentiated relation to the unconscious that does not regress to pleromatic containment. Neumann names Osiris — dismembered and re-membered — as the mythologem adequate to this movement: the hero becomes culture by being broken and reassembled, not by further conquest. The structure is the same as what Jung describes under individuation, and Neumann explicitly identifies the two: “this psychological mutation with its symptomatology and symbolism Jung has described as the individuation process” (par. 155).

The transformation stage is the ground on which Edinger‘s later systematization of the ego-self-axis builds. It is also the point at which Neumann’s developmental scheme crosses into what Hillman will later contest — since Hillman resists the teleological movement toward integration. On Neumann’s reading, however, the ego’s whole heroic career is in the service of a return: the hard-won independence is offered back to the center that produced it.

Relationships

Primary sources

neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)