Quotes from Erich Neumann

A conexão entre o tempo, o inconsciente e o espirito lunar pertence, ainda mais profundamente do que tem sido demonstrado, a natureza essencial da consciência matriarcal. Somente através de uma compreensão adequada do caráter espiritual do arquétipo da lua podemos entender o significado da consciência matriarcal e do "espirito feminino".

The tests of masculinity and the proofs of ego stability, will power, bravery, knowledge of "heaven," and so forth, which are demanded of the hero, have their historical equivalent in the rites of puberty.

The fact that they have failed to rescue and redeem the feminine side of themselves is often expressed psychologically in an intensive preoccupation with universals to the exclusion of the personal, human element.

The more acute the systemization of consciousness is, the more sharply it constellates the contents of the unconscious.

Any content that functions through its emotional dynamisms, such as the paralyzing grip of inertia or an invasion by instinct, belongs to the sphere of the mother, to nature. But all contents capable of conscious realization, a value, an idea, a moral canon, or some other spiritual force, are related to the father-, never to the mother-system.

Affective reactions resulting from fascination are dangerous; they amount to an invasion by the unconscious.

In these circumstances, when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.

Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating. When we talk of the conscious mind "assimilating" an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.

Patriarchal castration has two forms: captivity and possession. In captivity, the ego remains totally dependent upon the father as the representative of collective norms—that is, it identifies with die lower father and thus loses its connection with the creative powers. It remains bound by traditional morality and conscience, and, as though castrated by convention, loses the higher half of its dual nature.

Emotion manifests itself simultaneously with an alteration of the internal secretions, the circulation, blood pressure, respiration, etc., but equally, unconscious contents excite, and in neurotic cases disturb, the sympathetic nervous system either directly, or indirectly, via the emotions aroused.

This progressive interiorization is a symptom of the individualization and intensification of human consciousness, and this same principle, which first promoted the growth of personality, continues to govern the next phase of its development (Part II).

The more unconscious the whole of a man's personality is and the more germinal his ego, the more his experience of the whole will be projected upon the group.

Consciousness = deliverance: that is the watchword inscribed above all man's efforts to deliver himself from the embrace of the primordial uroboric dragon. Once the ego sets itself up as center and establishes itself in its own right as ego consciousness, the original situation is forcibly broken down.

It is only now, in the present crisis of modern man, whose over accentuation of the conscious, cortical side of himself has led to excessive repression and dissociation of the unconscious, that it has become necessary for him to 'link back" with the medullary region.

To fly too high and fall, to go too deep and get stuck, these are alike symptoms of an overvaluation of the ego that ends in disaster, death, or madness.

The assimilation and ingestion of the "content," the eaten food, produces an inner change. Transformation of the body cells through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes experienced by man. How a weary, enfeebled, and famished man can tum into an alert, strong, and satisfied being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating drink: this is, and must remain, a fundamental experience so long as man shall exist.

The fusion of areas of consciousness which for us are more or less clearly defined leads, as it were, to a perpetual game of hide-and-seek with ourselves and to a confusion of ego positions. Emotional instability, ambivalent pleasure-pain reactions, the interchangeability of inside and outside, of individual and group—all these result in an insecurity for the ego which is intensified by the powerfully emotional and affective "vectors" of the unconscious.

Consciousness has to resist these instinctive reactions because the ego is liable to be overpowered by the blind force of instinct, against which the conscious system must protect itself if development is to proceed.

The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals.8

Thus, as the ego develops, it is imperative to prevent a situation from arising in which the dynamic-emotional component of an unconscious image or archetype would drive the ego into an instinctive reaction and so overwhelm consciousness.

Centroversion is the innate tendency of a whole to create unity within its parts and to synthesize their differences in unified systems.

If the emergence of an archetype is not immediately followed by an instinctive reflex action, so much the better for conscious development, because the effect of the emotional-dynamic components is to disturb, or even prevent, objective knowledge, whether this be of the external world or of the psychic world of the collective unconscious.

If the ego is to attain a condition of tranquillity in which to exercise discrimination, consciousness and the differentiated function must be as far removed as possible from the active field of emotional components. All differentiated functions are liable to be disturbed by them, but the disturbance is most evident in the case of thinking, which is by nature opposed to feeling and even more to emotionality.

Even personal complexes, i.e., semiconscious "split offs" which belong to the upper layers of the personal unconscious and are affectively charged and "feeling-toned," can evoke physical alterations in the circulatory system, in the respiration, blood pressure, and so on.