Neumann's "Away from the mother" is not a motto anyone chose consciously — it is the founding grammar of a civilization, so old it has ceased to sound like a decision and started sounding like nature. What he is naming is a structural move: consciousness consolidates itself precisely by defining what it will not be, and what it will not be is the unconscious, the feminine, the undifferentiated ground. The dragon is not simply an enemy to be slain; the dragon is the very condition of there being a hero at all. Without something to push against, the ego has no shape.

What Neumann leaves open — and this is worth sitting with — is what happens when the struggle is declared "successfully concluded" before it is finished. The heroic posture is then not a phase but a permanent arrangement, and the ego goes on generating dragons to justify the sword it will not put down. The spiritual development of Western man, as he puts it, is organized around this economy: the more successfully masculine consciousness suppresses the unconscious, the more violent the unconscious becomes on its return, which then requires further suppression. The dragon grows. What Neumann does not quite say, but the logic implies, is that the heroic motto contains its own undoing — not as tragedy, but as the ordinary rhythm of a psyche that has confused the means of development with its destination.