Depth Psychology and a New Ethic

Name: Depth Psychology and a New Ethic
Author: Erich Neumann

Depth Psychology and a New Ethic is a work by Erich Neumann (1949).

Core claims

Neumann’s “new ethic” is not a relaxation of moral demands but a radical escalation: it extends ethical responsibility from the narrow domain of conscious intention to the entire psyche, including the autonomous operations of the unconscious — a move that makes the old ethic’s rigorism look like complacent self-deception.
The book’s most dangerous and original claim is that moral perfection is itself a form of collective violence: the repression required to maintain an unblemished persona generates shadow projections that fuel scapegoat psychology, war, and mass psychosis — the “good” person is epidemiologically infectious.
Neumann reframes the encounter with evil not as a theological or philosophical problem but as a psycho-political emergency: the untested unconscious of leaders — morally upright by old-ethic standards — is the hidden engine of historical catastrophe, making depth-psychological self-knowledge a prerequisite for legitimate governance.

How does Neumann’s concept of the shadow as collectively contagious compare to Edinger’s account of ego inflation in Ego and Archetype — are they describing the same structural failure from different vantage points?
Neumann claims that “becoming conscious must now rank as an ethical duty.” How does this imperative relate to James Hollis’s insistence in Living an Examined Life that the unlived life is the source of most human destructiveness?
Neumann’s critique of the old ethic’s dualism — its splitting of good from evil — directly anticipates Marion Woodman’s work on body-soul dissociation. How might Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection be read as a feminist extension of Neumann’s argument about the violence inherent in moral perfectionism?