Uroboros

The uroboros — the serpent that swallows its own tail — is Neumann’s name for the undifferentiated ground from which consciousness emerges. It is not an image among images but the image of the state before images: the “pre-egoid unity of uroboric containment” in which subject and object, interior and exterior, self and world have not yet come apart (Neumann 2019, par. 49). Participation mystique is its anthropological name; the uroboros is its mythological one.

In the uroboric state, “no ego center had as yet developed to relate the world to itself and itself to the world. Instead, man was all things at once… Everything inside was outside… everything outside was inside” (Neumann 2019, par. 45). The characteristic feeling-tone is an ambivalent pleasure-pain, not a pleasure principle: “in no circumstances does the Great Mother archetype of the collective unconscious represent the ‘locus of pleasure.’ To associate the unconscious only with the pleasure principle, as opposed to the reality principle, is proof of a depreciating tendency” (Neumann 2019, par. 109).

Consciousness emerges from the uroboros by the act Neumann calls the separation of the World Parents. Once the uroboros divides, the ego — the “son” — stands in the space between heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, and faces the dragon-fight that tests whether the emancipation will hold (Neumann 2019, par. 62). The uroboros remains the structural substrate of all further development: every regression is a regression toward it.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• separation-of-the-world-parents
• hero-myth
• centroversion

Primary sources

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