Erich Neumann Quotes

#1. This progressive interiorization is a symptom of the individualization and intensification of human consciousness, and this same principle, which first promoted the growth of personality, continues to govern the next phase of its development (Part II).

Erich Neumann

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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.

Erich Neumann

#5. Affective reactions resulting from fascination are dangerous; they amount to an invasion by the unconscious.

Erich Neumann

#6. 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

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

Erich Neumann

#8. 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

#9. Accordingly, the fertility goddess is both mother and virgin, the hetaera who belongs to no man but is ready to give herself to any man.

Erich Neumann

#10. Personality is built up largely by acts of introjection: contents that were before experienced outside are taken inside.

Erich Neumann

#11. Moreover, the subjective interpretation which sees the myth as a transpersonal psychic event is, in view of the myth's origins in the collective unconscious, much fairer than an attempt to interpret it objectively,

Erich Neumann

#12. 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.

Erich Neumann

#13. The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals.8

Erich Neumann