Whereas in the first half of life the central position of the ego does not allow the workings of centroversion to come to consciousness, the middle period is characterized by a decisive change of personality. Centroversion becomes conscious. The ego is exposed to a somewhat painful process which, starting in the unconscious, permeates the entire personality. This psychological mutation with its symptomatology and symbolism Jung has described as the individuation process, and he has amplified it with a wealth of material in his works on alchemy. We can say, then, that with the phenomenon of the second half of life the personal development of centroversion enters upon a second phase. Whereas its initial phase led to the development of the ego and to the differentiation of the psychic system, its second phase brings development of the self and the integration of that system. But, although the transformation process runs in the opposite direction to the development which took place during the first half of life, the ego and consciousness are not disintegrated; on the contrary, there is an expansion of consciousness brought about by the ego reflecting upon itself. It is as though the ego were restored to its original position: it emerges from its monomaniac self-obsession and becomes once more the vehicle of the totality function. The unconscious activity of the self dominates the whole of life, but it is only in the second half that this activity becomes conscious. While the ego is being built up in early childhood there is a gradual centering of consciousness, with the ego as the representative organ of wholeness. In puberty the individual, as an ego, feels himself to be the representative of collective wholeness. He becomes a responsible member of the collective, and between them there exists the same creative relationship as between the ego and the unconscious. From puberty up to the time of the climacteric, a period of active expansion which goes into reverse at the onset of the second half of life, the outward dialectic is conducted between individual and collective. Then, with individuation, comes the mastering of the inner dialectic between the ego and the collective unconscious.
— Erich Neumann
Neumann's architecture here is seductive precisely because it offers a map — and maps, when the psyche is in pain, do enormous work. The promise runs through the whole passage: the first half builds, the second half integrates; disorder is symptom, not verdict; the ego that felt itself swallowed will emerge enlarged. This is the grammar of consolation, and it is not wrong so much as it is incomplete in a specific way.
What the passage names as "painful process" is quickly metabolized into developmental logic. The mutation has symptomatology, yes — but the symptomatology is already framed as instrumental, pointing toward integration, serving centroversion's larger arc. The suffering is legible, which means it is, in a quiet way, already half-dissolved. Jung's own alchemical amplifications, which Neumann invokes here, were darker than this: the nigredo does not know it is leading somewhere; that is precisely what makes it nigredo.
The ego "restored to its original position" — that phrase deserves slow attention. Restoration implies a prior wholeness that development temporarily obscured. But the soul's speech in the middle of its crisis is not, in most cases, about restoration. It is about the failure of every strategy it has been running. What breaks in the second half of life is not the ego's isolation but the logic that isolation was serving — the long bet that enough achievement, enough mastery of the outward dialectic, would finally settle the interior. Neumann sees the reversal; he reads it as return. The harder reading is that there is nowhere to return to.
Erich Neumann·The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton·2019