Quotes from Erich Neumann

Only by indirect means, when reflected in Athene's mirror, can the Gorgon be destroyed—in other words, only with the help of the patron goddess of consciousness, who, as the daughter of Zeus, stands for "heaven.

The mother is earlier than the son. The feminine has priority, while masculine creativity only appears afterwards as a secondary phenomenon. Woman comes first, but man "becomes.

so long as culture is "in balance," the individuals contained in it normally stand in an adequate relationship to the collective unconscious, even if this is only a relationship to the archetypal projections of the cultural canon and to its highest values.

A masculinidade é vinculada com o ego e com a consciência, ela rompeu deliberadamente a relação com a natureza e com o destino em que a consciência matriarcal tem tão profundas raízes.

In a word, the woman first exists as a mother, and the man first exists as a son.10

it can be shown that philosophical and scientific thinking gradually developed out of symbolic thinking by progressively emancipating itself from the emotional-dynamic components of the unconscious.

Everywhere the female is "terrible"; she is the seducer, the instrument of castration, cause of the two tree-fellings and of the death of the bull. But, despite everything, she is not terrible only; she is also the fruitful mother goddess, who is impregnated by the splinter of wood in order to bring forth the seduced, slain, and sacrificed Bata as her son.

While in the beginning the ego germ lay in the embrace of the hermaphroditic uroboros, at the end the self proves to be the golden core of a sublimated uroboros, combining in itself masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious elements, a unity in which the ego does not perish but experiences itself, in the self, as the uniting symbol.

through the masculinization and emancipation of ego consciousness the ego becomes the "hero." The story of the hero, as set forth in the myths, is the history of this self-emancipation of the ego, struggling to free itself from the power of the unconscious and to hold its own against overwhelming odds.

The inside "expresses" itself by way of the symbol.

Those flower-like boys are not sufficiently strong to resist and break the power of the Great Mother. They are more pets than lovers.

In other words, the feminine image extricates itself from the grip of the Terrible Mother, a process known in analytical psychology as the crystallization of the anima from the mother archetype.

The loneliness of Prometheus on the rock or of Christ on the cross is the sacrifice they have to endure for having brought fire and redemption to mankind.

Consequently possession by the archetype brings meaning and deliverance at once, since it liberates part of the emotional forces that had been dammed up through the development of consciousness and the resultant exhaustion of emotional components.

With the freeing of the captive and the founding of a new kingdom, the patriarchal age comes into force. It is not yet patriarchal in the sense that the female is subjugated, only in the sense that the male exercises independent control over his children.

Thus the anima component of the personality is connected with the "voice" which expresses the creative element in the individual, contrasted with the conventionality of the father, of the collective, of conscience.

Perseus defeats the unconscious through the typical act of conscious realization.

He would not be strong enough to gaze directly upon the petrifying face of the uroboros, so he raises its image to consciousness and kills it "by reflection.

The assimilation of unconscious contents, in whatever form, leads not only to an enrichment of the conscious material but to an enrichment of libido, which makes itself felt, subjectively, as excitement, vivacity, and a joy that sometimes borders on intoxication; and, objectively, as a heightening of interest, a broadened and intensified capacity for work, mental alertness, etc.

Man experiences the "masculine" structure of his conscious as peculiarly his own, and the "feminine" unconscious as something alien to him, whereas woman feels at home in her unconscious and out of her element in consciousness.

So long as the man loves only the bounteous mother in woman, he remains infantile. And if he fears woman as the castrating womb, he can never combine with it and reproduce himself. What the hero kills is only the terrible side of the female, and this he does in order to set free the fruitful and joyous side with which she joins herself to him.

The two interpretations are mutually complementary. The structural—objective—interpretation seeks to embrace the whole span of the structure represented by the person of Faust, and then combine it with the genetic interpretation which recognizes that the Faust figure stands for the totality of Goethe's psychic situation, both conscious and unconscious, and for the whole history of his development.

When, for example, the myths call God the "Father," they do so, not on a given paternal basis, but because they set up a father figure to which every given father figure has to adjust itself.1

More: she is something that cries out to be rescued, set free, and redeemed, and she demands that the man shall prove himself manly, not merely as the bearer of the phallic instrument of fertilization, but as a spiritual potency, a hero. She expects strength, cunning, resourcefulness, bravery, protection, and readiness to fight.