Quotes from Erich Neumann

is nevertheless a conflict between the developing ego consciousness and the world of instinct. The former must always put its own specific mode of behavior, which pursues very different aims, in place of collective and instinctive reaction, for the latter is by no means always in accord with the individual aims of the ego, nor with its preservation.

But let us be careful! We are speaking of ourselves. If this art is degenerate, we too are degenerate, for innumerable individuals are suffering the same collapse of the cultural canon, the same alienation, the same loneliness – the rising blackness with its shadow and devouring dragon. The disintegration and dissonance of this art are our own; to understand them is to understand ourselves.

the group and group-consciousness were dominant…[the individual] was not an autonomous, individualized entity with a knowledge, morality, volition, and activity of its own; it functioned solely as a part of the group, and the group with its superordinate power was the only real subject.

In the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the dead man receives instruction, and the instruction culminates in the doctrine that he shall know himself identical with the great white light that shines beyond life and death:

When, with growing self-awareness, he experiences his relation to an opponent, and the sacrificed realizes his identity with the sacrificiant, and vice versa, the hitherto cosmic opposition of light and darkness is experienced as an opposition between human or divine twins, and the long succession of fraternal feuds in mythology opens with the squabbles between Osiris and Set, Baal and Mot.7

The animating principle of mana, the effect of magic, the magical efficacy of spirits, and the reality of collective ideas, dreams, and ordeals are all governed by the laws of this interior reality which modern depth psychology is trying to bring to the surface.

Only then, as a result of his light-creating and space-creating intervention, was there heaven above and earth below, back and front, left and right-in other words, only then was space organized with reference to an ego.

The fact that, for the Great Mother, father and son are nothing but the fertilizing phallus can also be formulated from the masculine standpoint by saying that victor and victim are always the same: the triumphant sacrificer himself becomes a future sacrifice. Consciousness

This position of detachment is a primary condition of consciousness, and it is the essence of its functioning to intensify and differentiate this attitude still further.

task of the hero, which is to "awaken those sleeping images that can and must come forth from the night, in order to give the world a better face," is far indeed from "masturbation.

Therefore the demiurge made the world in the shape of a sphere, giving it that figure which of all is the most perfect and the most equal to itself.

Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the nonego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.

Pain and discomfort are among the earliest factors that build consciousness. They are "alarm-signals" sent out by controversion to indicate that the unconscious equilibrium is disturbed.

It is, however, impossible to find the treasure unless the hero has first found and redeemed his own soul, his own feminine counterpart which conceives and brings forth.

THE AIM of the extraverted type of hero is action: he is the founder, leader, and liberator whose deeds change the face of the world. The introverted type is the culture-bringer, the redeemer and savior who discovers the inner values, exalting them as knowledge and wisdom, as a law and a faith, a work to be accomplished and an example to be followed.

The psychic world of images is a synthesis of experiences of the inner and outer world, as any symbol will show.

From the union of the hero's ego consciousness with the creative side of the soul, when he "knows" and realizes both the world and the anima, there is begotten the true birth, the synthesis of both.

IN THE COURSE of Western development, the essentially positive process of emancipating the ego and consciousness from the tyranny of the unconscious has become negative.

Stability and indestructibility, the true goals of centroversion, have their mythological prototype in the conquest of death, in man's defenses against its power, for death is the primorial symbol of the decay and dissolution of the personality.

The important thing is that consciousness as the acting center precedes consciousness as the cognitive center, in the same way as ritual precedes myth, or magic ceremonial and ethical action precede the scientific view of the world and anthropological knowledge.

Containment in the uroboros and its supremacy over the ego mean, on the bodily level, that ego and consciousness are at the outset continually at the mercy of the instincts, impulses, sensations, and reactions deriving from the world of the body.

Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Way are but Myself toward Myself.

The center common to conscious action through the will and to conscious knowledge through cognition is, however, the ego.

Ego consciousness has, as the last-born, to fight for its position and secure it against the assaults of the Great Mother within and the World Mother without. Finally it has to extend its own territory in a long and bitter struggle.