The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype

922 Pages·2015·68.39 MB·English

by  Erich Neumann

BOLLINGEN SERIES XLVII
ISIS
Tomb of Thutmosis IV, Thebes, XVIII Dynasty
THE GREAT MOTHER
AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARCHETYPE
BY
ERICH NEUMANN
Translated from the German by
RALPH MANHEIM
With a new foreword by
MARTIN LIEBSCHER
BOLLINGEN SERIES XLVII
BOLLINGEN SERIES XLVII
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright 1955 © 1963 by Bollingen Foundation Inc., New York, NY;
Copyright © Renewed 1983 by Princeton University Press
New foreword by Martin Liebscher copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by
Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
press.princeton.edu
Second Edition, 1963
First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1972
First Princeton Classics Edition, with a new foreword by Martin Liebscher, 2015
This is the forty-seventh in a series of works sponsored by Bollingen Foundation Paperback ISBN:
978-0-691-16607-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930406
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To C. G. Jung
FRIEND AND MASTER
IN HIS EIGHTIETH YEAR
FOREWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS
EDITION
“Bachofen is overall a treasure chest of psychological knowledge, if one
understands him—his merits as an historian aside—as a modern
researcher of the soul, something he himself was not aware of. For
instance, as soon as you read the tellurian [= chthonic or earth centred]
region as the unconscious and oppose it to the uranian region of
consciousness, all of his findings—interpreted symbolically and not
historically—gain a new and highly modern significance.”1
T
HIS PRAISE of the Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose
study Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character
of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (1861) can be seen as the foundational
text of modern theories of matriarchy, was written by the German-born
Jewish psychologist Erich Neumann (1905–1960). The passage
originates from an unpublished manuscript on the Jakob-Esau brother
motif and was written during Neumann’s first years in British Mandate
Palestine, where he had migrated in 1934.
After the Nazis had seized power in Germany, Neumann, a dedicated
Zionist since his youth, left Berlin with his family in the autumn of 1933
to settle in Tel-Aviv for good. He briefly interrupted his journey, until
May 1934, to study with Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich. These few months
not only qualified the young man, who had just finished his study of
medicine and held a university degree in psychology and philosophy, to
practice as a psychotherapist, but also formed the beginning of a
friendship and correspondence with the Swiss psychologist that lasted