The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Bollingen Series)

Loving or nurturing or hostile and devouring, The Great Mother is explored as a primordial image of the human psyche in this landmark book by the renowned analytical psychologist Erich Neumann. Here he examines how this archetype has been outwardly expressed in many cultures and periods since prehistory drawing on ritual, mythology, art, and records of dreams and fantasies.Through a wealth of descriptive passages and reproductions of artistic works ranging from Paleolithic stone carvings to the sculptures of Epstein and Moore, Neumann shows how the feminine has been represented: as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snake to bird. In studying this array of both static and transformative images, Neumann discerns a universal experience of the Maternal as a dual source of life support and fear: an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by The Great Mother. Neumann examines how the **Feminine** has been experienced and expressed in many cultures from prehistory to our own time. Appearing as goddess and demon, gate and pillar, garden and tree, hovering sky and containing vessel, the Feminine is seen as an essential factor in the dialectical relation of individual consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the ungraspable matrix, symbolized by the Great Mother. Erich Neumann,was a psychologist, philosopher, writer, and student of Carl Jung. **Career** Neumann was born in Berlin to a Jewish family.[1] He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1927 and then continued to study medicine at the University of Berlin, where he acquired his first degree in medicine in 1933. In 1934 Neumann and his wife Julia, who had been Zionists since they were teenagers, moved to Tel Aviv.[1] For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute. He also lectured frequently in England, France and the Netherlands, and was a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and president of the Israel Association of Analytical Psychologists. He practiced analytical psychology in Tel Aviv from 1934 until his death from kidney cancer in 1960.[1] **Contributions** Neumann contributed to the field of developmental psychology and the psychology of consciousness and creativity. He had a theoretical and philosophical approach to analysis, contrasting with the more clinical concern in England and the United States. His most valuable contribution to psychology was the empirical concept of "centroversion", a synthesis of extra- and introversion. However, he is best known for his theory of feminine development, a theory formulated in numerous publications, most notably The Great Mother. His works also elucidate the way mythology throughout history reveals aspects of the development of consciousness that are parallel in both the individual and society as a whole. Jordan B. Peterson: Erich Neumann is the most well-regarded student, analyst & distiller of Carl Jung's work. Appearing as goddess and demon, gate and pillar, garden and tree, hovering sky and containing vessel, the Feminine is seen as an essential factor in the dialectical relation of individual consciousness. This book examines how the Feminine has been experienced and expressed in many cultures from prehistory to our own time. WHEN analytical psychology speaks of the primordial image or archetype of the Great Mother, it is referring, not to any concrete image existing in space and time, but to an inward image at work in the human psyche.