Top 40 Erich Neumann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Erich Neumann

3. “To fly too high and fall, to go too deep and get stuck, these are alike symptoms of an overvaluation of the ego that ends in disaster, death, or madness.”

— Erich Neumann

4. “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

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

— Erich Neumann

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals.8.”

— Erich Neumann

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Erich Neumann

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

— Erich Neumann

18. “Ego consciousness is a sense organ which perceives the world and the unconscious by means of images, but this image-forming capacity is itself a psychic product, not a quality of the world. Image formation alone makes perception and assimilation possible.”

— Erich Neumann

19. “In these circumstances, when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.”

— Erich Neumann

20. “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

21. “Individualization, ego formation, and heroism belong to the very life of the male group and are in fact its expressions.”

— Erich Neumann

22. “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

23. “The self-generating power of the soul is man’s true and final secret, by virtue of which he is made in the likeness of God the creator and distinguished from all other living things. These images, ideas, values, and potentialities of the treasure hidden in the unconscious are brought to birth and realized by the hero in his various guises – savior and man of action, seer and sage, founder and artist, inventor and discoverer, scientist and leader.”

— Erich Neumann

24. “Patriarchal castration has two forms: captivity and possession. In captivity, the ego remains totally dependent upon the father as the representative of collective norms – that is, it identifies with die lower father and thus loses its connection with the creative powers. It remains bound by traditional morality and conscience, and, as though castrated by convention, loses the higher half of its dual nature.”

— Erich Neumann

25. “Centroversion is the innate tendency of a whole to create unity within its parts and to synthesize their differences in unified systems.”

— Erich Neumann

26. “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

27. “The more acute the systemization of consciousness is, the more sharply it constellates the contents of the unconscious.”

— Erich Neumann

28. “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

29. “Consciousness of the bond between the male opponents is the beginning of masculine self-consciousness.”

— Erich Neumann

30. “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

31. “The assimilation and ingestion of the “content,” the eaten food, produces an inner change. Transformation of the body cells through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes experienced by man. How a weary, enfeebled, and famished man can tum into an alert, strong, and satisfied being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating drink: this is, and must remain, a fundamental experience so long as man shall exist.”

— Erich Neumann

32. “The fact that they have failed to rescue and redeem the feminine side of themselves is often expressed psychologically in an intensive preoccupation with universals to the exclusion of the personal, human element.”

— Erich Neumann

33. “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

34. “The more unconscious the whole of a man’s personality is and the more germinal his ego, the more his experience of the whole will be projected upon the group.”

— Erich Neumann

35. “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

36. “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

37. “The fusion of areas of consciousness which for us are more or less clearly defined leads, as it were, to a perpetual game of hide-and-seek with ourselves and to a confusion of ego positions. Emotional instability, ambivalent pleasure-pain reactions, the interchangeability of inside and outside, of individual and group – all these result in an insecurity for the ego which is intensified by the powerfully emotional and affective “vectors” of the unconscious.”

— Erich Neumann

38. “An extremely common cause of marital conflicts and divorces lies in the fact that the development toward a new phase of relationship, vitally necessary for one partner, is tragically doomed to failure owing to the other partner’s lack of understanding or inability to participate in the development.”

— Erich Neumann

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Only by killing the First Parents can a way be found out of the conflict into personal life.”

— Erich Neumann

42. “Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating. When we talk of the conscious mind “assimilating” an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.”

— Erich Neumann

43. “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

44. “Whenever the energy-charge of unconscious contents becomes excessive, they discharge themselves from the unconscious and are projected.”

— Erich Neumann