The Jungian Developmental Arm

Jung wrote the psyche synchronically — a field of archetypes, complexes, ego, Self, held in dynamic relation. Neumann wrote it diachronically — a history, a staged unfolding the mythologems preserve. This is the developmental arm of analytical psychology, and it is almost entirely Neumann’s.

The arc is: uroboros → neumann-great-mother → separation-of-the-world-parents → hero-myth / dragon fight → emancipation of the ego → (midlife) centroversion becoming conscious → individuation. The whole movement is governed by centroversion — the psyche’s intrinsic tendency to organize around a center — which is hidden in the work of ego-building in the first half of life and emerges into consciousness as what Jung had already named individuation (Neumann 2019, par. 155).

The arc is recapitulated in every life. Puberty stages a version of the dragon fight; midlife stages the emergence of centroversion. The arc is also culturally recapitulated in the patriarchal suppression of the Great Mother archetype, a suppression Neumann reads as a historically necessary but one-sided development of Western consciousness (Neumann 2019, par. 123). The Jungian developmental arm thus joins a phenomenology of the individual life to a phenomenology of cultural history — both read through the same archetypal stages.

Sources

• erich-neumann: the developmental schema in Origins and The Great Mother
• carl-jung: the archetypal theory Neumann elaborates developmentally
• johann-jakob-bachofen: the matriarchal hypothesis Neumann re-reads psychologically