Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (Neumann)

The methodological and substantive claim that underwrites Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness: that the developmental stages of the individual ego recapitulate the psychic history of the species, and are legible through the same archetypal mythologems.

“The link between ontogenesis and human history alone gives us the justification for having ranged so far afield in our exposition of the latter subject, and for claiming at the same time that the real concern of this book is the treatment of modern man and his urgent problems. A psychotherapy of the individual, and a culture therapy of society as a whole, seem to us to be possible only when we have achieved a synoptic view of the origin and significance of consciousness and its history” (Neumann 2019, par. 150). The index of the book confirms the double register explicitly — “consciousness: ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of” is the organizing entry (par. 173).

Neumann’s method is archaeological-sequential, not chronological. He adapts Flinders Petrie’s “sequence-dating” from Egyptology: the archetypal stages — uroboros, neumann-great-mother, separation-of-the-world-parents, dragon-fight, Osiris/transformation — have a determinable order qua psychic stages, even where the historical dating of their surviving mythological texts remains independent of that order. This is what allows him to treat a Vedic hymn, an Egyptian ritual, and a Grimms’ tale as witnesses to the same developmental moment.

The recapitulation thesis is the biological metaphor (Haeckel) redeployed in the psyche’s domain, where it fares better than in embryology because the archetype — not the body — is the entity whose forms persist across time. This is the thesis that lets the book claim both scientific generality and therapeutic immediacy; it is also the thesis that post-Jungian critics (Hillman especially) will later press upon, since it licenses a developmental reading of myth that archetypal psychology resists.

Sources

• erich-neumann: ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of consciousness run on the same archetypal rails (neumann-origins-history-consciousness, par. 150, 173–174)
• erich-neumann: the stages have sequential order without requiring chronological coordinates (methodological appropriation of Petrie’s sequence-dating)