Erich Neumann

Erich Neumann was the analytical psychologist who gave carl-jung‘s archetypal theory its developmental form. Born in Berlin in 1905, he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in 1927, completed his medical examinations in 1933, and from 1934 made his permanent home in Tel Aviv, where he practiced as an analytical psychologist until his death in November 1960. He studied with Jung in Zurich in 1934 and 1936 and from 1948 contributed regularly to the Eranos meetings in Ascona (Neumann 1955, Bollingen biographical note). He worked in sustained correspondence with Jung while carrying the developmental portion of the Jungian project Jung himself did not systematize.

His two principal works form a single argument in two movements. The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949) traces the masculine-developmental arc through the creation myth (uroboros, neumann-great-mother, separation-of-the-world-parents), the hero myth (dragon-fight, the slaying of the mother, the slaying of the father), and the transformation myth (treasure-hard-to-attain, Osiris). The Great Mother (1955) analyzes the feminine archetype through the elementary-and-transformative-character, structured by the contrast of matriarchal-consciousness and patriarchal consciousness Neumann inherited and psychologized from johann-jakob-bachofen‘s Mutterrecht.

Neumann’s signature theoretical contribution is centroversion — the psyche’s intrinsic tendency to generate a center, operating unconsciously in first-half-of-life ego-formation and consciously in the individuation of the second half. From this follows the primary-relationship between mother and child which edward-edinger elaborated into the ego-self-axis, and the fragmentation-of-the-archetype by which ego consciousness breaks the numinous unity of the archetype into manageable series of images. Andrew Samuels places Neumann alongside Edinger at the center of the developmental axis of post-Jungian thought (Samuels 1985). james-hillman‘s archetypal psychology would later set itself against precisely this developmentalism.

Neumann also wrote Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), Amor and Psyche (1952), and The Archetypal World of Henry Moore (1959), extending the archetypal phenomenology of the feminine beyond The Great Mother itself (Neumann 1955, biographical note). He died on 5 November 1960, seven months before Jung, leaving unfinished a planned complementary volume on the female psychology of the Great Mother.

Erich Neumann

Erich Neumann

Key concepts

Major works