Quotes from Erich Neumann

As in poetry, so in mythology, the figures must submit to the same dual interpretation.

A significant analogy may be found in dreams, which are compensations of consciousness directed by centroversion.

the profound insight of the activated trans-personal layer, and the sharp vision of a highly developed consciousness, have to be brought into relationship

Similarly, at the stage of the son who separates the World Parents, and its equivalent the fight with the dragon, there is not only a change of content but a changed level of emotionality.

kinship libido."8 That is to say, the original state of participation mystique in the uroboros expresses itself as the force of inertia that keeps man fixed in the oldest and most intimate of family ties. These family ties are personalistically projected to mother and sister; and the symbolic incest with them, straining back to the uroboros, is therefore marked by a 'lower femininity" which binds the individual and his ego to the unconscious.

As everywhere in the ancient world, virginity simply means not belonging to any man personally; virginity is in essence sacred, not because it is a state of physical invio-lateness, but because it is a state of psychic openness to God.

A man whose consciousness is possessed by a particular content has an enormous dynamism in him, namely that of the unconscious content; but this counteracts the centroversion tendency of the ego to work for the whole rather than for the individual content.

The formation and consolidation of the conscious system and its struggle for autonomy and self-preservation are just as important a factor in the history of psychic development as the relativizing of this autonomy through the constant tension between conscious and unconscious.

Every system resists dissolution and reacts to danger with pain, just as it reacts to stimulation and libido enrichment with pleasure. Since the ego is the center of the conscious system, we identify ourselves primarily with the pleasure-pain reactions of this system as though they were our own. But in reality the source of the ego's pleasure-pain experience is by no means only the conscious system.

Though the anima figure also has transpersonal characteristics, she is closer to the ego, and contact with her is not only possible, but is the source of all fruitfulness.

The psychic system, and to an even greater extent consciousness itself, is an organ for breaking up, digesting, and then rebuilding the objects of the world and the unconscious, in exactly the same way as our bodily digestive system decomposes matter physiochemically and uses it for the creation of new structures.

Although standing from the very beginning under the motto "Away from the unconscious," the ego, as the organ of centre-version, must never lose touch with it, for it is an essential part of its natural balancing function to give the transpersonal world its due place.

the conscious state is the late and uncommon phenomenon, and its complete attainment is far more of a rarity than modern man so flatteringly pretends, while the unconscious state is the original, basic, psychic situation

The danger of alienation from the unconscious presents itself in two forms: sclerosis of consciousness, and possession.

Group unity in participation is still so widely prevalent, even in modern man, that it is only through the ceaseless conscious efforts of certain individuals of genius that we gradually become aware of the psychic factors which, as the unconscious "cultural pattern" we so blindly accept, regulate the life and death of each one of us.

Matriarchal castration involves loss of masculine consciousness, deflation, and degradation of the ego. Its symptoms are depression, a flowing off of libido into the unconscious, anemia of the conscious system, and an "abaissement du niveau mentdf (Janet). In the inflation of patriarchal castration brought on by the ego's identification with the spirit, the process is the other way around. It leads to megalomania and overexpansion of the conscious system.

For what the center brings Must obviously be That which remains

to the end And was there from eternity. GOETHE, Westöstlicher Diwan

But one of the facts we are always coming up against in our psychic experience is that growth takes place by fits and starts. There are retentions and blockages of libido which have to be breached by a new phase of development. Always the "old system" hangs on until the opposing forces are strong enough to overcome it. Here, too, "war is the father of all things.

Liberation and free activity only become possible when the ego system has more libido at its disposal than the retentive system, i.e., when the ego's will is strong enough to break away from the corresponding archetype.

For [the Mother Goddess,] loving, dying, and being emasculated are the same thing.

The predominance of vegetation symbolism means not only the physiological predominance of the vegetative (sympathetic) nervous system; it also denotes, psychologically, the predominance of those processes of growth which go forward without the assistance of the ego.

Progression through the archetypal phases, the patriarchal orientation of consciousness, the formation of the superego as the representative of collective values within the personality, the existence of a collective value-canon, all these things are necessary conditions of normal, ethical development. If any one of these factors is inhibited, developmental disturbances result.

In the early uroboric state there is a fusion both of man with the world and of the individual with the group.