The Origins and History of Consciousness

by Erich Neumann

Book Overview

The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691163596
• ISBN13: 9780691163598
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 552 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A Classic on the Path of Individuation

I read Neumann's work in the late 70s after an intense spiritual awakening which was first expressed in Christian fundamentalism in the early 70s. During a time of study at the C.G. Jung Foundation and the New School (New York City) I began to discover the spiritual meaning and personal potential of the Christian myth. The work continues to this day, and I am thankful to Neumann and others (Edinger, Jacobi, Von Franz, Whitmont, Harding, Campbell, Kunkel, Nicoll, Sanford, Hillman) who extended the insights of Jung for pioneers along the path of individuation.

A profound linking of ego psychology and world mythology

A prominent psychologist, knitting together the elements of Jung's psychological theory and some new elements of his own, shows how the great cycles of world myth depict the hard-won development of ego-consciousness in humanity, and how this development is recapitulated in each individual's life. Twenty-six years ago, when I first read this book, Jung's ideas were much more popular than they are now. In this era of cognitive science and its focus on the physiological underpinnings of psychology, there doesn't seem to be room for Jung's collective unconscious, its archetypes, and their polymorphous manifestations in myth and symbol. But this, I think, is more a matter of fashion than any reflection on the quality of Jung's thinking, which was vast, deep, and bold. Neumann, a student of Jung, with erudition comparable to that of his teacher, synthesizes Jung's ideas into a unified theory of psychology around his own new concept of "centroversion", his name for the integrative force of the organism--its survival instinct in the widest sense. He shows how ego-consciousness--the self-aware "I" of the modern human being--is the preeminent organ of centroversion, and that, like other, physical, organs, it has had its own evolutionary history. This history, reflected in the structure and behavior of the modern ego, forms the deep story underlying world mythology. In Part I of the book, Neumann shows how the birth and emancipation of the ego is reflected in three great cycles of myth: the creation myth, the hero myth, and what he calls the transformation myth, which is the apotheosis of the hero. The primordial mythological image is that of the "uroboros"--the serpent biting its own tail, symbolizing the womblike plenum of the unconscious, in which consciousness exists only as a potential. It flickers in and out of existence, almost like the virtual particles of modern nuclear physics. As the germ of consciousness gains strength, it comes to see the nurturing womb of the unconscious in the symbol of the Great Mother. The moment of the ego's realization of its own autonomous existence is mythologized as the Separation of the World Parents--a universal motif, in which the hero creates the manifest world by pushing his parents apart to form Heaven and Earth. Next come the hero myths: the birth of the hero and his struggle with the dragon, which represents the negative aspects of both Mother and Father. Neumann shows how the great myth of the dragon, hoarding its treasure and holding a princess captive, has a deep and precise meaning for the development of consciousness. Then, as though all that were not enough, he moves on to Part II: a discussion of the developmental stages of the inidividual ego in light of its symbolic development in human culture. Each of us, man and woman, undergoes these mythological dramas in our quest for consciousness and identity, with the climaxes of the struggle representing the familiar crises of development at characterist

Jungian psychology clearly described.

This book was written by Erich Neumann, not C.G. Jung who wrote the Foreword. Neumann is, in my opinion, perhaps the best writer on Jungian psychology.

Explains the fundamentals of Pagan Psychology

Neumann's expo on the Uroboros as the core of primal human psychology is still the best yet. He is scholarly yet readable and free of the American-type "new age" psycho-babble of the late 20th century (this was published in 1953 I believe). "Paganism" is everyone's first "religion" if only because we all come from the Urobroric womb and are naturally endowed with the self -contained narcissism that takes all things in nature exactly as they first appear to us (what you "see" is what you get so to speak--there is no such thing as metaphor, allegory, irony, etc.) Ideally, we grow out of this stage and progress to higher stages, but as the "baby-boom" generation has revealed, many people do not evolve much beyond this stage. The current popular social obsession with sex (fueled by the all-powerful visual medium of television) at face value and as an end in itself shows that many people never get beyond the primal sexual stage after they leave the Uroboric stage--if they ever get beyond that even! If you are a pessimistic neo-Freudian or Nietzschean, you are bound to believe that most people never do--or easily regress to lower (previous) levels of more primitive consciousness in times of severe distress.

An essential reference for studies of consciousness

Neumann continued Jung's work, adding substantially, modifying and clarifying. Went much further into the origin and evolution of consciousness, and the depiction of this in the Great Mother/Hero myths. Alluded to symmetries between social and psychological structures, contemporary mythic systems and artistic and other cultural expressions.