The Origins and History of Consciousness Quotes

“Personality is built up largely by acts of introjection: contents that were before experienced outside are taken inside.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Thus the Great Mother is uroboric: terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemori-ally old and eternally young.4”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The average ego, the average individual, remains fixed in the group, although in the course of development he is compelled to give up the original security of the unconscious, to evolve a conscious system, and to take upon himself all the complications and sufferings which such development entails.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The pleasurable qualities associated with the previous ego phase, once that system is outgrown, become painful for the ego of the next phase.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“In Sanskrit, “independent woman” is a synonym for a harlot. Hence the woman who is unattached to a man is not only a universal feminine type but a sacral type in antiquity.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Again, just as the digestive system decomposes food into its basic elements, so consciousness breaks up the great archetype into archetypal groups and symbols which can later be assimilated as split-off attributes and qualities by the perceptive and organizing powers of the conscious mind.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“in Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Only by killing the First Parents can a way be found out of the conflict into personal life.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Whenever the energy-charge of unconscious contents becomes excessive, they discharge themselves from the unconscious and are projected.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Among primitives, and wherever the conditions are primitive, the conflict between individual consciousness and the collective tendencies of the unconscious is resolved in favor of the collective and at the cost of the individual.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Centroversion persistently strives to ensure that the ego shall not remain an organ of the unconscious, but shall become more and more the representative of wholeness. That is to say, the ego fights against the unconscious tendency that seeks to master it, and instead of allowing itself to be possessed, learns to keep its independence in relation to both inside and outside.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Uroboric, because it is dominated by the symbol of the circular snake, standing for total nondifferentiation, everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything, depending on everything, and connecting with everything; pleromatic, because the ego germ still dwells in the pleroma, in the “fullness” of the unformed God, and, as consciousness unborn, slumbers in the primordial egg, in the bliss of paradise.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“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.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The hero is an ego hero; that is, he represents the struggles of consciousness and the ego against the unconscious. The masculinization and strengthening of the ego, apparent in the hero’s martial deeds, enable him to overcome his fear of the dragon and give him courage to face the Terrible Mother—Isis—and her henchman Set.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Mother, sister, wife, and daughter are the four natural elements in any relationship between men and women.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The symbol is therefore an analogy, more an equivalence than an equation, and therein lies its wealth of meanings, but also its elusiveness. Only the symbol group, compact of partly contradictory analogies, can make something unknown, and beyond the grasp of consciousness, more intelligible and more capable of becoming conscious.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The fabric of archetypal canon which used to support the average man has given way... [p. 439]”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Individualization, ego formation, and heroism belong to the very life of the male group and are in fact its expressions.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Spiritual inflation, a perfect example of which is the frenzied-ness of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, is a typical Western development carried to extremes. Behind the overaccentuation of consciousness, ego, and reason—sensible enough in themselves as the guiding aims of psychic development—there stands the overwhelming might of “heaven” as the danger which goes beyond the heroic struggle with the earthly side of the dragon and culminates in a spirituality that has lost touch with reality and the instincts.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“If the ego is to attain a condition of tranquillity in which to exercise discrimination, consciousness and the differentiated function must be as far removed as possible from the active field of emotional components. All differentiated functions are liable to be disturbed by them, but the disturbance is most evident in the case of thinking, which is by nature opposed to feeling and even more to emotionality. More than any other function, differentiated thinking requires a “cool head” and “cold blood.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“If the ego is to attain a condition of tranquillity in which to exercise discrimination, consciousness and the differentiated function must be as far removed as possible from the active field of emotional components. All differentiated functions are liable to be disturbed by them, but the disturbance is most evident in the case of thinking, which is by nature opposed to feeling and even more to emotionality.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“If the emergence of an archetype is not immediately followed by an instinctive reflex action, so much the better for conscious development, because the effect of the emotional-dynamic components is to disturb, or even prevent, objective knowledge, whether this be of the external world or of the psychic world of the collective unconscious.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Thus, as the ego develops, it is imperative to prevent a situation from arising in which the dynamic-emotional component of an unconscious image or archetype would drive the ego into an instinctive reaction and so overwhelm consciousness.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals.8”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Consciousness has to resist these instinctive reactions because the ego is liable to be overpowered by the blind force of instinct, against which the conscious system must protect itself if development is to proceed.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“It is only now, in the present crisis of modern man, whose over accentuation of the conscious, cortical side of himself has led to excessive repression and dissociation of the unconscious, that it has become necessary for him to ‘link back” with the medullary region.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Emotion manifests itself simultaneously with an alteration of the internal secretions, the circulation, blood pressure, respiration, etc., but equally, unconscious contents excite, and in neurotic cases disturb, the sympathetic nervous system either directly, or indirectly, via the emotions aroused.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Affective reactions resulting from fascination are dangerous; they amount to an invasion by the unconscious.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The more acute the systemization of consciousness is, the more sharply it constellates the contents of the unconscious.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves. Like living organisms, they devour other complexes and enrich themselves with their libido.”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness