Quotes from Erich Neumann

Personality is built up largely by acts of introjection: contents that were before experienced outside are taken inside.

Thus the Great Mother is uroboric: terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemori-ally old and eternally young.4

The average ego, the average individual, remains fixed in the group, although in the course of development he is compelled to give up the original security of the unconscious, to evolve a conscious system, and to take upon himself all the complications and sufferings which such development entails.

The pleasurable qualities associated with the previous ego phase, once that system is outgrown, become painful for the ego of the next phase.

Again, just as the digestive system decomposes food into its basic elements, so consciousness breaks up the great archetype into archetypal groups and symbols which can later be assimilated as split-off attributes and qualities by the perceptive and organizing powers of the conscious mind.

In Sanskrit, "independent woman" is a synonym for a harlot. Hence the woman who is unattached to a man is not only a universal feminine type but a sacral type in antiquity.

Only by killing the First Parents can a way be found out of the conflict into personal life.

in Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious.

The ego will receive the reward of moral recognition by the collective to the exact extent to which it succeeds in identifying with the persona, the collectivized façade personality – the simple reason being that this façade personality is the visible sign of agreement with the values of the collective.

by identifying his personal ego with the transpersonal in the shape of the collective values, the limited individual loses contact with his own limitations and becomes inhuman.

our aim has been to provide anyone who is seriously interested with an introduction to the world of the archetypes, and to make this introduction as simple as possible. For this reason we have included… a number of schemas, or diagrams, which as experience has shown, make things much easier for most people, though by no means for all." Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, p.xii.

An extremely common cause of marital conflicts and divorces lies in the fact that the development toward a new phase of relationship, vitally necessary for one partner, is tragically doomed to failure owing to the other partner's lack of understanding or inability to participate in the development.

The hero is an ego hero; that is, he represents the struggles of consciousness and the ego against the unconscious. The masculinization and strengthening of the ego, apparent in the hero's martial deeds, enable him to overcome his fear of the dragon and give him courage to face the Terrible Mother—Isis—and her henchman Set.

The collective and the group members do not experience the world objectively, but mythologically, in archetypal images and symbols; and their reaction to it is archetypal, instinctive, and unconscious, not individual and conscious.

Uroboric, because it is dominated by the symbol of the circular snake, standing for total nondifferentiation, everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything, depending on everything, and connecting with everything; pleromatic, because the ego germ still dwells in the pleroma, in the "fullness" of the unformed God, and, as consciousness unborn, slumbers in the primordial egg, in the bliss of paradise.

Among primitives, and wherever the conditions are primitive, the conflict between individual consciousness and the collective tendencies of the unconscious is resolved in favor of the collective and at the cost of the individual.

Centroversion persistently strives to ensure that the ego shall not remain an organ of the unconscious, but shall become more and more the representative of wholeness. That is to say, the ego fights against the unconscious tendency that seeks to master it, and instead of allowing itself to be possessed, learns to keep its independence in relation to both inside and outside.

Tanto para o masculino como para o feminino, a totalidade só é atingível quando, numa união dos opostos, o dia e a noite, o mais alto e o mais baixo, as consciências patriarcal e matriarcal, chegam ao seu próprio modo de produtividade e mutuamente se complementam, fertilizando um ao outro.

Mother, sister, wife, and daughter are the four natural elements in any relationship between men and women.

The fabric of archetypal canon which used to support the average man has given way... [p. 439]

Accordingly, the fertility goddess is both mother and virgin, the hetaera who belongs to no man but is ready to give herself to any man.

Thus the hero's rescue of the captive corresponds to the discovery of a psychic world. This world is already of vast extent as the world of Eros, embracing everything that man has ever done for woman, everything that he has experienced and created for her sake. The world of art, of epic deeds, poesy, and song which revolves round the liberated captive spreads out like a virgin continent that has broken away from the world of the First Parents.

For, with the liberation of the captive, a portion of the alien, hostile, feminine world of the unconscious enters into friendly alliance with the man's personality, if not actually with his consciousness.

Moreover, the subjective interpretation which sees the myth as a transpersonal psychic event is, in view of the myth's origins in the collective unconscious, much fairer than an attempt to interpret it objectively