48 Quotes by Erich Neumann

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

Mother, sister, wife, and daughter are the four natural elements in any relationship between men and women.

Any content that functions through its emotional dynamisms, such as the paralyzing grip of inertia or an invasion by instinct, belongs to the sphere of the mother, to nature. But all contents capable of conscious realization, a value, an idea, a moral canon, or some other spiritual force, are related to the father-, never to the mother-system.

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

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.

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.

The pleasurable qualities associated with the previous ego phase, once that system is outgrown, become painful for the ego of the next phase.

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.

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.