Jung and the Jungians on Myth by Walker Steven;

Author:Walker, Steven;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1666847
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Neumann and Myths of the Great Mother

Jung was fortunate in having a number of pioneering students who, after absorbing the lessons of the master, went on to push back the frontiers of Jungian psychology. Some have done this by extending the range of material covered; others by rethinking and reorienting certain theoretical positions; some have done both. To this last group Erich Neumann belongs. Within the limitations of a short introductory study devoted to Jung and the Jungians as theoreticians of myth, it is possible only to highlight some aspects of the rich and original thinking of this highly gifted Jungian.

Neumann was born in Berlin in 1905, studied with Jung between 1934 and 1936, and spent most of his career in Israel, where he died prematurely in 1960. His book The Great Mother (1955) was dedicated “to C.G. Jung, friend and master, in his eightieth year.” It constitutes a major reorientation in the field of the Jungian study of myth, highly original in its theoretical assumptions and daring in the range of its material. In spite of his openness to the feminine side and to the problems of the anima, Jung himself had relatively little to say about the Great Mother archetype. He was much more concerned with archetypal images of the Wise Old Man and, in his later years, with the Old Testament myth of the father god Yahweh, with which he wrestled in his controversial 1952 book Answer to Job. Jung—and Jungian psychology during his lifetime—always remained somewhat patriarchal in orientation. (There is a striking photograph of Jung at age eighty-five surrounded by a small crowd consisting of his children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren, in which he seems the very image of the archetypally prolific patriarch.)36

Neumann's particular originality as a Jungian lay in his countering of latently patriarchal attitudes with a new emphasis on the power of the Feminine. As a German Jew who lived and wrote in Israel, the traditional land of the Old Testament father god, Erich Neumann was drawn, perhaps by way of compensation, to the force of ancient associations of Near Eastern lands with the cult of the Magna Mater that early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had suppressed. He made it his creative task at the end of his life to study the many representations of the neglected archetype of the Great Mother.

As in his earlier magnum opus, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), Neumann was initially concerned with the development over time of the mythology associated with the Great Mother: from the Uroboros, the circular snake biting its own tail, which symbolizes the united primordial parents; to the archetypal feminine and then to the Great Mother, whose emergence signifies separation from the Great Father; to the further distinctions of Good Mother and Terrible Mother. Such speculations made a name for Neumann since they gave the Jungian study of myth a plausible scenario for the prehistoric development of mythology as well as an easily visualizable schema for the understanding of how one set of mythological images could have emerged from another.

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