Ovum

The Seba library treats Ovum in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Neumann, Erich, Samuels, Andrew).

In the library 9 passages

As late as the nineteenth century, men could not accept the actual Jungian of ovum and sperm as necessary for the embryo. Empiricists might say men could not accept this Jungian because they could not see it; others might put the failure of sight secondary to the opacity of interior, archetypal vision

Hillman argues that the historical refusal to recognize the ovum’s equal reproductive necessity reflects not empirical limitation but the opacity of a masculine archetypal vision that systemically devalued the feminine contribution to conception.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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it corresponds to the archetype of the Terrible Mother. Moreover it is prefigured in the ‘eating’ of the male spermatazoon by the fertilized ovum. Once the access of sexual instinct has subsided and fertilization is accomplished, the dominance of the alimentary uroboros reasserts itself in the mother.

Neumann reads the fertilized ovum’s absorption of the male spermatozoon as a biological ground for the archetype of the Terrible Mother, in which the alimentary uroboros supersedes the erotic impulse once conception is achieved.

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

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Sperm are many, the ovum one; so, animus is a multiplicity, anima a unity.

Hillman elaborates a biological analogy in which the singularity of the ovum versus the plurality of sperm provides a model for the anima’s unity in contrast to the animus’s multiplicity.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis

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Fordham made a connection between archetypes and genes, arguing that ‘it is only what is contained in a fertilised ovum that is inherited’ and concluding that ‘when it is said that archetypes are hereditary functions what is meant is that they must somehow be represented in the germ cells’

Fordham, as reported by Samuels, grounds the hereditary transmission of archetypes biologically in the fertilized ovum, insisting that inherited contents must be represented in germ-cell material.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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any fertilized ovum is a potential new life and a strictly logical attitude would draw no distinction between the youngest embryo and a fully formed child.

Harding invokes the fertilized ovum to mark the threshold at which potential life begins, noting that a strictly logical ethics of life-protection would collapse all distinctions between embryonic stages.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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Buffon’s experiments produced as their main result the impossible ‘discovery’ of sperm in the liquor folliculi of the ovaries of nonimpregnated female animals. Male seed was produced even by females!

Hillman cites Buffon’s experimental distortions as evidence that projective archetypal assumptions — specifically the primacy of male seed — actively shaped and corrupted early embryological observation.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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wherever it was conceded that there was female seed, or where the even rarer concession was made that such seed was necessary for reproduction, female seed was inferior.

Hillman surveys the Western philosophical tradition on female seed, arguing that even when feminine generative contribution was acknowledged it was systematically ranked as inferior to the masculine.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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An old word for ‘egg’, preserved in several languages, but in various forms: The word probably represents *h3eHmos or *h2eh3mos… Lat. ovum, OHG ei, ON egg

Beekes traces the Proto-Indo-European etymology of the egg-word, confirming that Latin ovum shares an ancient common root with Germanic and other Indo-European forms for ‘egg.’

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside

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