Erich Neumann

The mother is, after all, the matrix from which life emerges, and creation myths often portray this feminine principle as the primordial waters from which the world emerges.

Jungian analyst Eric Neumann writes, So long as the infantile ego consciousness is weak and feels the strain of its own existence as heavy and oppressive, While drowsiness and sleep are felt as delicious pleasure, it has not yet discovered its own reality and differentness.

Being oneself is still a wearisome and painful experience, still the exception that has to be overcome.

Many forms of nostalgia and longing signify no more than a return to uroboric incest and self-dissolution, from the unio mystica of the saint to the drunkard's craving for unconsciousness.

And to be clear, he didn't invent this either.

He took it from Eric Neumann, Jung's student, whose book The Great Mother came out in 1955. and peterson quotes newman at length in maps of meaning section 234 which is titled the great mother images of the unknown or unexplored territory peterson's own line in that section is this quote the unknown as it can be encountered is female and female with paradoxical qualities so the tradition exists it runs young to newman to peterson and i'm not going to treat that tradition as a men's forum meme but i want us to listen to what the word chaos is doing in that passage it means the unknown including what hasn't been mapped yet possibility and birth that's the sense peterson is using The electrician describes a woman calling her husband's phone at 6.02pm because she knows he's walking through the door.

Nothing about that is unknown or unexplored.

It is a highly predictable, repetitive, scheduled event rather than an encounter with unexplored territory.

It's like the prima materia of the feminine is the snake that eats its own tail.

This is why Eric Newman talks about the dragon fight where you split, separate, and then you have to fight the dragon, which is these impulses internally that you come up against.

And what that guy would have experienced in being rejected by the woman would have been an unconscious deep rejection from the mother that he hasn't had and so he doesn't know how to handle it.

And I think with men and going through this process, It's so important to understand that containment is really important through capacity, through doing difficult things, and that this split is going to happen regardless of whether you want it to happen or not.

His self-esteem and his self-image depend upon her smile, her approval, The spirit of regression can also lead to the adoption of harmful lifestyles not centered around psychological dependence on a woman.

As Eric Neumann argues in his book, the fear of the feminine, world weariness, neurotic sickness, or the placid acceptance of the commonplace in the attempt to avoid struggle, can all signify that the spirit of regression is active in our mind.

Regressions of this sort give rise not only to typical anxiety, neuroses and phobias, but also, and especially, to addictions and, if the ego is extensively destroyed, to psychoses.

To break free from the spirit of regression and move towards manhood, we need to cultivate a heroic attitude.

The shadow is on one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side healthy instinctivity and the prerequisite for higher consciousness.

Or as Jung's renowned student, Eric Neumann, wrote, The recognition and acceptance of the shadow presupposes more than a mere willingness to look at one's dark brother and then to return him to a state of suppression where he languishes like a prisoner in a jail.

It involves granting him freedom to share in one's life.

Reconnecting with the positive side of our shadow, minimizing the effects of its negative side, and integrating it all into our conscious sense of self, produces a character that tends toward the ideal of wholeness, which Jung believed defined the psychologically healthy.

And most importantly, just as adequately functioning physical organs are essential for a healthy body, a healthy mind is reliant on the proper functioning of the archetypes.

As Newman explains, The archetypal structural elements of the psyche are psychic organs, upon whose functioning the well-being of the individual depends, and whose injury has disastrous consequences.

An important difference between the physical organs and the archetypes is that while physical organs can be directly observed with the senses, the archetypes cannot.

The existence of archetypes is revealed by the arrangements they produce in consciousness, namely through the manifestation of symbolic imagery.

However, as Jung stated in the passage just quoted, the symbolic manifestation of the archetypes do not vary limitlessly and chaotically.

Therefore, as one takes note of and reflects on the symbols as they are manifested in consciousness, knowledge of the archetypal structure of the mind can be obtained.

Eric Newman describes the role of the symbol in producing knowledge of the archetypes in the following way.

The form of representation peculiar to the unconscious is not that of the conscious mind.

The hero represents the conscious ego.

The mature ego struggling to free itself from the grip of unconscious forces is the hero, wrote Erich Neumann.

The dragon is the overarching symbol of the terrible mother or the regressive unconscious forces of the negative mother complex that overpower the conscious ego and lead to the adoption of regressive yearnings and behaviors.

The awe-inspiring character of this dragon consists essentially in the terrible mother's power to seduce the ego and then to castrate and destroy it in matriarchal incest.

History teaches that in the beginning, the individual did not exist as an independent entity.

In the early state, there is a fusion of the individual with the group, wrote the psychologist Eric Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness.

In medieval society, man started to emerge as an independent individual, yet his social needs were still satisfied through the diverse community associations that flourished in towns and villages, such as markets, guilds, local assemblies, town councils, communes, churches, fraternities, charities, monasteries, universities, and the primal community of the family.

This multitude of community associations provided medieval man with a strong sense of social belonging that not only bolstered his psychological health, but also his courage and will to resist external powers which posed a threat to his social groups.