Origins and History of Consciousness

* Book: The Origins and History of Consciousness. By Erich Neumann. Princeton University Press, 2014

URL = https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691163598/the-origins-and-history-of-consciousness

= "In this book ... Neumann argues that each individual’s psychological growth recapitulates the history of humanity".

Description

1. Camilla Paglia:

"Neumann’s first published book was Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), which interpreted the “scapegoating” of the Nazi era as a projection of repressed cultural and psychological forces. In the same year appeared his first magnum opus, The Origins and History of Consciousness, with a foreword by Jung. In this book, my personal favorite of his works, Neumann argues that each individual’s psychological growth recapitulates the history of humanity. He charts what he calls “the mythological stages in the evolution of consciousness”: the creation myth, the hero myth, and the transformation myth, identified with the Egyptian god Osiris. Here he also presents his idiosyncratic theory of centroversion in ego formation—a blend of extraversion and introversion."

(http://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Paglia-Great-Mother1.pdf)

2. From the publisher:

"The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung’s most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying of the Dragon, Rescue of the Captive, and Transformation and Deification of the Hero. Throughout the sequence, the Hero is the evolving ego consciousness."

(https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691163598/the-origins-and-history-of-consciousness)