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Uroboros-to-Individuation Arc

Uroboros-to-Individuation Arc

The full developmental arc of Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness traced as a single line: from the undifferentiated pleromatic uroboros, through the Great Mother stage and its splitting into Good and Terrible aspects, through the separation of the World Parents and the ego’s founding act of negation (determinatio-est-negatio), through the dragon-fight and the battle for deliverance, and finally — in the second half of life — into the Osiris stage where the hard-won ego enters individuation and the ego-Self axis becomes the governing structure.

The arc is held together by centroversion — “the intrinsic tendency of the psyche to organize around a center” — which operates unconsciously in the first half of life (building the ego) and consciously in the second (integrating the Self). “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” (Neumann 2019, par. 155).

What the arc buys Jungian psychology is a developmental vocabulary it did not previously have. Jung described the archetypes; Neumann arranges them on a temporal axis. The arc is foundational for Edinger‘s later systematization of the ego-Self operations — each of which can be located on Neumann’s curve — and for any post-Jungian reading of the hero-myth as a pattern of ego-differentiation rather than a literary type. It is also what makes Neumann’s book the single text the library points to when a reader asks where individuation begins and where it ends.

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