Quotes About Erich Neumann

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.

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.

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

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.

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