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The Origins and History of Consciousness QUOTES

The Origins and History of Consciousness QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

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 , The Origins and History of Consciousness

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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 , The Origins and History of Consciousness

16 " Thus the hero’s rescue of the captive corresponds to the discovery of a psychic world. This world is already of vast extent as the world of Eros, embracing everything that man has ever done for woman, everything that he has experienced and created for her sake. The world of art, of epic deeds, poesy, and song which revolves round the liberated captive spreads out like a virgin continent that has broken away from the world of the First Parents. "

― Erich Neumann , The Origins and History of Consciousness

17 " For, with the liberation of the captive, a portion of the alien, hostile, feminine world of the unconscious enters into friendly alliance with the man’s personality, if not actually with his consciousness. "

― Erich Neumann , The Origins and History of Consciousness

18 " 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 , The Origins and History of Consciousness

19 " 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

20 " The tests of masculinity and the proofs of ego stability, will power, bravery, knowledge of “heaven,” and so forth, which are demanded of the hero, have their historical equivalent in the rites of puberty. "

― Erich Neumann , The Origins and History of Consciousness