In this article we will present a brief biography of Erich Neumann, a psychoanalyst of German origin who eventually became Carl Jung’s most eminent disciple.
Although he moved away from the classic assumptions of Jung’s analytical psychology in some respects, he continued in many ways with his thesis and concepts, some of which he developed and deepened.
- One of the most important aspects of Erich Neumann’s biography is that he has surpassed other theorists in the concept and importance of the maternal figure in the process of human development.
- In his day.
- The father figure occupied the interest of Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysts.
“Every woman is, like every uterus, the primordial uterus of the Great Mother, from which everything comes, the womb of the unconscious. Does it threaten the ego of the danger of self-destruction, loss, that is, death and castration?”? Erich Neumann-
Erich Neumann left a valuable work in which he combined some of Freud’s postulates with the essence of Jung’s theory, used some inputs from Freud’s psychology and combined them with the Jungian thread that brought all these phenomena closer to the collective unconscious and mythology.
Erich Neumann was born in Berlin on January 23, 1905, later became a citizen of Israel, came from a Jewish family. He studied medicine and philosophy, areas that, at one point, brought him closer to Carl Jung and he soon began to frequent the social circle of this great psychoanalyst.
In his works, Neumann rigorously applies the method of amplification proposed by Jung’s analytical psychology, linked to the process by which unconscious or dreamlike images are associated with universal symbols, present in mythology, religion, mystical ideas, etc.
That is, unconscious individual content must be associated with these universal references so that they can be interpreted correctly, that is, the process of analysis of a person seeks the presence of universal content in that particular individual, this is what allows him to interpret his symptoms. .
For Neumann, the central reference of these universal content is mythology, so much so that Jung himself recognized that the work of his disciple Erich Neumann was much broader than his in this regard.
The name Erich Neumann gained notoriety mainly for one of his great contributions: the great complex Mère. Il based on the idea that there is in all cultures a myth linked to a grandmother, often represented as Mother Earth. These goddesses are even earlier than aparición. de the male gods.
Neumann described the Great Mother as an archetype, corresponds to the female dimension and is shaped in three ways: the good mother, the bad mother and the combination of the two; these configurations correspond, in turn, to the good mother, the terrible one. mother and grandmother.
The first has positive male and female elements; the second, the negative elements of the two poles; the third, the positive and negative elements of both sexes.
The important thing about this conception is that it gives the feminine a fundamental role in the human psyche, something quite remarkable for a time when the focus was the Oedipus complex and the envy of the penis, even Jung himself had a more masculine vision of psychic development.
Erich Neumann, in addition to Jung’s disciple, was also part of the Circle of Eranos, a multidisciplinary organization, in this organization met once a year important intellectuals, each meeting lasted eight days, during which they lived and presented their ideas. on an issue in a friendly environment.
Each participant addressed a topic for a few hours, then the others fed back on what they called a feast of ideas, they did not intend to reach an agreement, but to create a kind of colorful kaleidoscope, all perspectives could be observed.
Neumann was one of the most influential members of the Circle of Eranos, almost all his theoretical ideas have gone through the projection of these presentations and collective discussions.
In the last years of his life he lived in Tel Aviv, where he died on November 5, 1960, his best-known works are The Origins and History of Consciousness, The Great Mother, A Phenomenology of the Feminine Creations of the Unconscious and Deep Psychology and New Ethics: a New Assessment of Human Behavior in the Light of Modern Psychology.