Law Of Secondary Personalization

The Law of Secondary Personalization, as articulated most fully by Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness, designates a psycho-historical process by which transpersonal, archetypal contents are reduced — often defensively — to merely personal, ego-bound terms. Neumann situates this law within his broader account of consciousness development: as ego identity strengthens and the personal sphere gains cultural dominance, the human tendency grows to explain away numinous, suprapersonal forces by translating them into familiar biographical or familial categories. This is not an innocent cognitive simplification; Neumann argues it functions as apotropaic defense-magic, a ‘nothing-but’ dismissal that simultaneously inflates the ego and desacralizes the unconscious. The process is historically necessary — secondary personalization helps extricate ego consciousness from the grip of the collective unconscious — but becomes pathological when it colonizes the whole field, leaving modern Western man incapable of perceiving anything beyond the personal horizon. Edinger receives this concept critically, accepting the principle of archetypal personalization while objecting that Neumann underweights the genuine constitutive role of personal relationship in shaping archetypal content. Together, these voices establish a productive tension: secondary personalization is both a developmental achievement and a potential epistemological catastrophe, depending on whether it remains in dialectical balance with recognition of the transpersonal.

In the library 13 passages

This tendency to reduce all transpersonal contents to personalistic terms is the most extreme form of secondary personalization… when secondary personalization seeks to assert itself by devaluing the transpersonal forces, it produces a dangerous overvaluation of the ego.

Neumann defines secondary personalization in its fullest and most dangerous form: the systematic reduction of transpersonal psychic contents to personal categories, which produces ego inflation and forecloses encounter with the unconscious.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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As ego consciousness and individual personality gain in importance and thrust themselves increasingly to the fore in the historical period, there is a marked strengthening of the personal element. In consequence, the human and personal sphere is enriched at the expense of the extrahuman and transpersonal.

Neumann traces the historical-developmental precondition of secondary personalization: the progressive ascendancy of ego consciousness at the cost of transpersonal depth.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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The mythologizing process is the exact opposite of secondary personalization, but, here as there, the center of gravity of the hero-figure is displaced towards the human activity.

Neumann clarifies the conceptual polarity by contrasting secondary personalization with mythologization, both of which displace the hero-figure’s center of gravity, though in opposing directions.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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An important archetypal image has not undergone personalization or coagulatio through a personal relationship and hence retains a boundless and primordial power that threatens to inundate the ego if it is approached.

Edinger illustrates the clinical consequences of failed personalization, showing that archetypes not mediated through personal relationship retain overwhelming, ego-threatening power.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

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That part of the archetype which the parent’s personality is able to activate, mediate and embody is the part which the child can incorporate most easily into his or her own personality. That part of the archetype to which the parent has no relation will be left largely unrealized in the realm of eternal forms.

Edinger partially counters Neumann by arguing that personal parental relationship genuinely constitutes which portions of an archetype become psychically real, complicating any purely transpersonal account.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002supporting

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Innate, predetermined, archetypal factors have been emphasized almost to the exclusion of the personal. This imbalance is a result of the historical circumstances of the birth of analytical psychology.

Edinger critiques the Jungian-Neumannian tendency to privilege the transpersonal to excess, calling for a theory that integrates the necessary personalizing function of concrete human relationship.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002supporting

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archetypal structures preformed in the collective unconscious are bound up with uniquely personal contents, without the one being derivable from the other. The kind of experience we shall have is prescribed by the archetypes, but what we experience is always individual.

Neumann articulates the irreducible duality of archetypal and personal factors that underlies secondary personalization’s conceptual tension: archetypes prescribe form, but personal content is always singular.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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Any reduction of the castration threat, parricide, the ‘primal scene’ of parental intercourse, and so on, to historical and personalistic data… is scientifically impossible.

Neumann explicitly attacks the reductionist move that secondary personalization enacts when applied retroactively to myth and symbol, naming psychoanalytic literalism as a prime instance.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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personal and transpersonal psychic factors… deflation of transpersonal, 335–37; and hero, 131f… personalization of transpersonal contents, 337–38; and secondary personalization, 19–20.

The index entry maps secondary personalization across multiple thematic nodes — hero, transpersonal deflation, personal-transpersonal balance — indicating the concept’s structural centrality to the book’s argument.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019aside

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The repression of the emotional-dynamic components is unavoidable, because conscious development demands that the ego be freed from the grip of emotion and instinct.

Neumann describes the developmental mechanism — repression of emotional-dynamic components — that enables secondary personalization to occur as the ego consolidates its independence from the unconscious.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019aside

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