The creation of consciousness

The question carries two registers at once: the historical-developmental (how did consciousness emerge, in the species and in the individual?) and the cosmological (what is consciousness for?). The tradition answers both, and the answers are not the same.

The developmental story

Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness remains the most architecturally ambitious account. Consciousness does not begin as a given; it crystallizes out of an undifferentiated psychic ground he calls the uroboros — the circular serpent that devours its own tail, the image of a totality that has not yet split into subject and object. The ego emerges from this matrix the way an island rises from water: tentatively, repeatedly submerged, gaining continuity only gradually.

The founding act of this emergence is negation. Neumann's compressed formula — determinatio est negatio — states the logic precisely: every determination is a saying-no to the undifferentiated ground. Consciousness begins not in affirmation but in refusal, the refusal to remain merged. The mythological image for this is the separation of the World Parents: heaven torn from earth, the ego establishing itself in the gap between them, purchasing differentiation at the cost of existential exposure. The formula explains why the ego is constitutively precarious — negation is effortful, always contested by the unconscious tendency toward merger.

Neumann is careful to note that this developmental arc is not merely historical but ontogenetic: every individual recapitulates it.

The first phase, which is one of differentiation, has its historical prototype in the formation of the ego and its development, that is, when the activity of centroversion passes from the psychic totality of the unconscious self and moves towards the ego.

Pain and discomfort are among the earliest builders of this structure. They are, in Neumann's language, "alarm-signals sent out by centroversion to indicate that the unconscious equilibrium is disturbed" — the organism's first insistence that something outside it exists and matters. Consciousness is not a luxury; it is the nervous system's attempt to hold the balance between inner and outer worlds.

The cosmological claim

Edinger reads Jung's governing myth as something more radical than a developmental story. In The Creation of Consciousness (1984), he grounds his reading in Jung's declaration from Memories, Dreams, Reflections that "man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence." On this account, individuation is not a therapeutic convenience but a cosmological obligation. The unconscious godhead — undifferentiated psychic reality — achieves objective form only through the instrument of human awareness. Creation is not finished; it finishes itself through consciousness.

Jung himself, in a seminar, put it more simply:

A plant that is meant to produce a flower is not individuated if it does not produce a flower, it must fulfill the cycle; and the man who does not develop consciousness is not individuated, because consciousness is his flower; it is his life, it belongs to our process of individuation that we shall become conscious.

The flower metaphor is deliberately modest — it refuses the heroic inflation that Neumann's hero-myth can invite. Beebe, reading Jung against Neumann, prefers this image precisely because it does not assume that consciousness originates in a monadic ego developing over time. Consciousness, on Jung's account, arises out of what he called "the peculiar intelligence of the background" — it is an emergent property of the unconscious itself, only secondarily collecting in the center called the ego.

Where the readings diverge

Neumann and Hillman part company here most sharply. Neumann's model — ego stages, hero myth, progressive differentiation — was criticized by Giegerich for taking its stages too concretely, rendering imaginal what should remain metaphorical, and by Hillman for being identified with "the hero's Apollonic definition of consciousness," a nineteenth-century progress-myth dressed in mythological clothing. Giegerich's counter-reading insists that the soul's history is not a developmental sequence of stages through which the ego passes but a series of logical constitutions — each one the sublated form of the previous — that the soul as a whole undergoes. The question is not where is this ego in its development? but what logical status does consciousness currently occupy?

What neither reading disputes is the basic phenomenological observation that consciousness is not a native fact of the psyche. It is made, not given. And what it is made from — the undifferentiated, the uroboric, the prima materia — never disappears. It persists beneath every achieved differentiation, available for regression, available for renewal.

The etymology of consciousness itself encodes this: from Latin con- (with, together) and scire (to know) — knowing with an other. Edinger noted that this points to the unconscious side of the term: consciousness is not simple knowing but knowing in a setting of twoness, always already in relation to something that exceeds the ego. The creation of consciousness is, in this sense, never completed. It is the ongoing act by which the psyche knows itself.

  • Erich Neumann — portrait of the depth psychologist who mapped consciousness's developmental arc
  • Edward Edinger — portrait of the Jungian analyst who developed the cosmological reading of individuation
  • Uroboros — the pre-egoid unity from which consciousness differentiates
  • Individuation — the lifelong process through which consciousness achieves its fullest form

Sources Cited

  • Neumann, Erich, 2019, The Origins and History of Consciousness
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1984, The Creation of Consciousness
  • Beebe, John, 2017, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type
  • Jung, C.G., 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self