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The Origins and History of Consciousness
The Origins and History of Consciousness
The Origins and History of Consciousness (German: Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins, 1949; Princeton / Bollingen edition 2019) is Neumann’s attempt to write the developmental history of the ego through the archetypal stages the myths preserve. Its structure follows an arc: the uroboros, the neumann-great-mother, the separation of the World Parents, the dragon fight, the transformation myth, and — in Part II — the cultural consequences of the ego’s emancipation.
Where Jung described the psyche synchronically as a field of archetypes and complexes, Neumann writes it diachronically. Consciousness has stages, those stages recapitulate themselves in every individual development, and they are legible in the mythologems of the ancient world. Neumann adapts Flinders Petrie’s archaeological method of “sequence-dating” to the psychic record: the stages have a determinable order without precise chronological coordinates. The uroboros comes “before” the Great Mother, and the Great Mother “before” the hero, even where the historical dating of any given mythological text remains independent of its psychological position. The central concept introduced here is centroversion — the psyche’s intrinsic tendency to organize around a center — which Neumann places beneath both the building of the ego in the first half of life and the individuation process in the second (Neumann 2019, par. 155).
The book is the load-bearing text of the Jungian developmental arm. It is foundational for later post-Jungian elaborations of the ego-Self axis and for any reading of the hero-myth as an archetypal pattern of ego differentiation.