Tension and confusion between the craving for the Great mother and yearning for the Self | Avi Bauman

In one of his first letters to Jung, Erich Neumann writes from Tel Aviv:

It is strange to recognize that my generation will only be an interim generation here – our children will be the first ones to form the basis of a nation. We are Germans, Russians, Poles, Americans etc. What an opportunity it will be when all the cultural wealth that we bring with us is really assimilated into Judaism. I don't share your opinion that there will be no Alexandrianism here, but rather, either nothing at all or something completely new.[1]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             And I am proud to be speaking as a Jungian-Neumannian psychologist in the Land of Israel. Is this proof of something completely new?

For us, the Israeli-Jewish nation, Neumann symbolizes the psychology that arose after the new Jewish settlement in  the Land of Israel and the renewal of Judaism, Hasidism, and "Israeliness" out of the Land of Israel. And with all the complexity of being an Israeli Jungian psychologist, Neumann helped us to sit in a better place and to benefit from this psychology, which is unlike more prevalent Freudian psychology, in that it relates very broadly to the psyche and its social and cultural, spiritual, religious elements, and to awareness of the individual path which is so important in Israeli society, which is characterized by strong collectivism.

Yet, tobe born and to live in the Land of Israel, being the second Jewish generation here, which Neumann calls “the generation that will fulfill the thing itself[ES1] ” is both a great privilege and a difficulty. This second generation hears, as it were, an exhortation:

You, the Jew born in the Land, bear everything upon your back that your new immigrants mother and father – refugees, Zionists, pioneers of self-renewal, scrolls of fire – placed upon you, building anew but also uprooted from their culture. This journey, for better or worse, forces your personal individuation to cope with the burden of your parents' past, what is expected from you. You were called upon to be a new Israeli Jewish hero, healing and compensating. You will carry the torch or become a memorial candle. Your path will be a twisting one in its “normalcy,” because you are the one who grew up under “normal” conditions: with a family, a land, and a state, a place, and a clearer Israeli Jewish identity! Indeed, this bears a great deal within it[2] .

            So to discuss the Jung-Neumann letters, written before the mid-twentieth century, is to relate to the previous generation, that of our parents or grandparents  , who immigrated about the same time as Neumann, as young people fleeing to Palestine from all over the world.

            Immigration

to Israel effected a great change in the immigrants and their psyche, and this lies in the background of much of the content of this paper.

            When we look retrospectively at the concerns of our psychologist patriarchs, Freud, Jung, and Neumann, we see three generations of creative geniuses (born in 1856, 1875, and 1905), whose theories reflect each of whom in turn brings in his theory both their own personal problems and those of his generation, his period, and the spirit of his time, the Zeitgeist.

            Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, marks the end of the Victorian age and the liberation of sexuality. In his theory, the ego and the superego are the masterpieces of the personality. They overcome the instincts and all the irrational voices that exist in our souls and helped us to become an adaptable person, who know how to love and work.

            On the personal level, Freud was a modern Jew who had cut himself off from Judaism, from religiosity, from irrationality, becoming a pioneer who tried hard to be accepted in the scientific community.

            Jung, who came after him, the founder of analytical psychology, marks the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. In his theory, beyond and above the "Freudian ego," a person is to become himself / herself, a full individual, including the religiosity, mysticism, and irrationality as part of the soul. He is the father of the idea that the soul is extremely complex, and large parts of it are inborn and objective.

            On the personal level, Jung knew the suffering of severing himself from Freud, undergoing a crisis, and plunging inward – studying himself in order to discover the totality of his complex, mystical soul, and to teach us about the soul in general, and more.

            After him came Neumann, the founder of depth psychology in the Land of Israel, the true Aquarian, marking the modern period, after the World War Two. Neumann expressed the creative search, the shaking off of paternalism, the beginning of feminism, and, mainly, the new humanism and the search for meaning.

            For us, the Israeli analytical psychologists, Neumann is a European Jewish intellectual, an immigrant and an Israeli pioneer, and also a depth psychologist who, by means of Jungian tools, experienced and foresaw the processes that this nation is undergoing in it revival. He had no personal conflict with Freud. He did not have to sever himself from him ideologically. He respected and revered him, and his connection to the ego and the superego, which he understood in depth, were better than Jung's. Hence, for us he complements Freud along with his strong Jungian foundation.

            Both Jung and Neumann believed that every personal neurosis also expressed the neurosis of the period, of the generation, of the nation. Adopting that idea, we find that in this critical period preceding the war, interesting and severe neuroses and psychoses were manifest in these two psychologists, and in their fascinating encounter we will see how each of them expresses the neurosis-psychosis of his surroundings./

            One the one hand, we have the European, Swiss-German, who, in consolidating his theory of the self, wants to believe he is searching in the depths, in the roots, and in the repressed and forgotten past. He is interested in alchemy, in German pagan sources, and in the roots of German culture, which were presumably repressed by Christianity. This is the neurosis, even the psychosis of this time, when all of Europe, especially Germany was subject to distress and racist fanaticism, which, tragically, became the spirit of the time. Hence we hear pronouncements from Jung like: “We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of conflict between the Germanic Barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God expressed some of it.[2]

            On the other hand was Neumann, the “wandering Jew,” seeking a place for himself, a land, a renewed identity, and connection with the creative unconscious. Around him was a critical collective time, in which the nation returned to its land and to its Jewishness. Both within and outside of himself were quests for the new Jew, connected to his roots, and at the same the aspiration of creating a new man. Perhaps for this reason, because he was torn from his European Jewish background, because of the trauma and the quest, it was important for Neumann to avoid disconnection and splitting in the formation of the new person in the new land! Hence, he was highly concerned with two things: that the self in combination with the new consciousness should not be cut off from the ancient totality, and therefore awareness of the ego-self axis, the unitary reality was of great importance to him. And also, because of the return to the land of the fathers it was extremely important to him that the renewal in the time of crisis would develop forward and not move backward, which would be regression to the Great Mother.

            Astonishingly, out of these contrary positions , in such a chaotic period, these two men, who represented opposing worlds, managed to preserve what they had in common in correspondence during the period before the Holocaust. This correspondence ceased between 1940 and 1945, the crucial war years, but it was later renewed.

            One may admire these two great men for maintaining their connection, though one may also criticize them.

            Although I am Israeli and perhaps might be suspected of arrogance, I will try to treat their connection with forgiveness, because I believe that the interpretation of sensitive matters like these must be made in the context of their period. It must also be remembered both Jung and Neumann, with their personal complexes, were at a different stages in their personal individuation. They were both dealing with highly influential factors in consolidating their theories  of personality and the structure of the psyche. Let us take a moment to examine how each of them looks in his process of the Self.

            Jung, the elder, was close to sixty. He had undergone personal crises, developed his theory of archetypes, and was intensively involved and fascinated by the Self and by alchemy. In one of his first replies to Neumann, after Neumann protested against his anti-Semitic and pro-German explanations of the situation in Germany, Jung explained to him, from his fascination with the Self, that in collective social processes, events which appear strange and irrational, like what was happening in Germany, are part of the action of the developing Self: “This conditionality is always the tragic given situation in which we are irredeemably immersed at first but the kingdom is never of this world. The Self remains a mysterious, otherworldly matter that insists on becoming visible with or against conditionality or situation. The evolving Self is the secret and absolute goal on the transpersonal level.”(Letter 15J)

            This is a repugnant and very troubling explanation of what was happening in Germany and expresses Jung's enthusiasm for his ideas about his new god, the Self, and his belief in it, even in combination with aggressive psychosis.

            On the other hand, Neumann, the younger man, was seeking a place and an identity in the effort to part with Jung. It is possible to see that Neumann was still in a transferential process of casting away the father figure – directed at Jung, a casting away in which he was caught in the same imaginary fascination that had characterized Jung in his attitude toward Freud, thirty years earlier.

            He tried to conciliate him and to be his successful student, unlike James Kirsch and others.

            Two events connected to the times and to the personal lives of Jung and Neumann are clearly present in the letters: the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Neumann's move to Palestine, which in a few years was to become the Jewish state, Altneuland[3]. These are extremely critical events for the two men and their way of thinking. Neumann's emigration to the Land of Israel, his Jewish quest, and his timely escape from Europe were central influential factors in the direction of his theory. Similarly, Jung's acceptance of the post of Chairman of the German Institute of Psychotherapy was a factor that reinforced his effort to explain away and understands the horror, with his tools, and even to identify with what was happening in Germany.

            Without doubt, 1935-40, the first years of the acquaintance between the two, were years of great distress for both of them, years of confusion, of being swayed, of walking in darkness. The confusion and bewilderedness are evident both in what they wrote and in the great difficulty they had in concentrating and developing their concepts.

            Jung went completely astray with the concepts of the archetype, as we see in his article on Wotan,[4](Jung 36) which is inundated with racist ideas and falls into a horrible trap in the effort to explain the phenomenon of Nazism and its rise by means of German pagan archetypes. Wotan is the god archetype, which, according to Jung, “only a German can understand.” In his opinion, the Germans were under the sway of this archetype, which is embodied in Hitler himself[5].(It would take decades for the Jungian community to be capable of using the concept “cultural complex,” after this fatal error, although Henderson developed the concept in 1947 and sent it to Jung in a letter. (This is an excellent concept that creates order and makes a more correct place for cultural influences on the unconscious via the complexes and not via the archetypes of the race.)

            Neumann was shocked by Jung's view that the Jews had an inferior unconscious. We shall see how much this shock affected the caution with which Neumann began to deal with the collective unconscious and with totality, when it is the devouring Great Mother and when it is a totality that he calls the Self or later the Self-Field.

            Neumann's shock did not last long. He loved Jung. He was flooded with transference toward the father-figure, having been helped by him as an inspiration and as a respondent to his ideas. Because of his isolation, he was both very dependent on him and also enriched by him.

            To Israeli eyes like ours, Neumann occupies the role of the wise Jewish intellectual, the somewhat submissive deracinated German Jew.

            Naturally Neumann, whose father died before Kristallnacht, was deeply upset by Jung's anti-Semitism, in particular during the five years of separation between them. He tried feverishly to find proofs and evidence for an ancient, renewed Jewish identity and to show that there is a special Jewish soul, which has deep, long roots. His letters from before the war show how much Neumann was aware of the degree to which he himself was cut off from Judaism and from Hasidism, and he tried to connect, using Jungian concepts.

            Interestingly, in an article in honor of the centenary of Freud's birth in 1956, he points out Freud's separation from religion, Freud's father-complex, and the heroic struggle with the archetype of the Jewish father as a central part of the change taking place in modern Judaism: “Judaism has broken its old religious fetter without having as yet arrived at a new orientation.”[6] Neumann goes on to explain why this complex, together with the Jewish taboo against the Great Mother, did not enable Freud to go deeper with the unconscious, the basic stratum of the soul, the Great Mother, from which everything grows.

            In his letters, Neumann tried to impress Jung with his findings and to demonstrate things about Judaism and its renewal, inviting his comments. As we read these letters, we get a glimpse into his world, into his encounter with the land, the Land of Israel, with Jewish motives and biblical contents, with renewed Judaism, and with his frustrations and doubts. In Letter No. 5 from Tel Aviv 'the white city'   he tells Jung:

I haven't found a “people” here with whom I fundamentally feel I belong. I might have known that before, of course but it was not the case ,and the fact that Jews here as people, as a not people, and seemed so extremely needy, was a shock at first. On the other hand,… though the landscape gripped me in such a compelling way that I couldn't ever have thought it possible…, as you prophesied, the anima has gone to ground, she made appearance all nice and brown, strikingly African, even more impenetrable in me, domineering –with sisterly relationships to many animals – a boa constrictor, a panther, an elephant, horse and rhinoceros, thus speak the images that give me strength.  However I feel strongly and more.. It is a people of infinite opposites…. but have constructed the prettiest villages and landscapes out of deserts and swamps (N5).

Neumann begins to make the path for himself! He belongs more, and he already predicts what will happen here in this country: “The way forward as I see it, is certainly hard, as it dangerous. I actually fear that all our repressed instincts, all our desires for power and revenge, all our mindless and hidden brutality will be released here.”

            The years without any correspondence, 1940-1945, were years of shock, of realization for Neumann, but also of creativity.

            Of course he bases himself on the ideas of Jung and develops them in the direction of what he encounters in himself and in his surroundings, and here we can see the beginning of separation and the consolidation of a personal line. Clearly Neumann is in a deep cultural vacuum, which leads him to base himself, to root himself to the earth, a very interesting connection as we have seen, which Jung also agrees is vital for the consolidation of Judaism. Jung is even curious about where it will develop to. “A soul without a soil” was the condition of the Jews in the past and what now? "I find it hard to comprehend a soul that has grown up without soil" (18J)

            These subjects will emerge repeatedly after the war at the Eranos meetings, which Neumann attends, to present his work, with new fruit, as appears in one of his dreams, which he sent to Jung.

            The questions that arise for us are:

            What in fact did the new earth, the separation from Europe, and the Israeli Jewish identity that he began to form, give to Neumann the depth psychologist? This is interesting both on the level of his personal individuation and on the level of the consolidation of the theory and the subjects that he continues to explore. Along with this, how did the traumatic circumstances, in which his separation from his parents and Europe took place, affect Neumann – immigration combined with trauma? What is his “Get thee out of thy country” (Gen. 12:1).

            Regarding Jung, what did his new German belongingness give him, the temporary identification with Germany, and with Nazi thought? And how did the falling away from it (the slipping up), influence the continuation of the construction of his theory after the horror of the war and the Holocaust? Did it? Jung fell victim to a personal and cultural complex, after which, when one parts from it, there is development. Did Jung understand that he had fallen into a complex? And how did it change him and his approach on the theoretical level?

            Neumann, the younger man, , as a new immigrant, with his individuation still to come, who did creative work here in this land, his new place, during the Holocaust and after it was very much influenced by the situation. He truly was separated, and he was renewed, formed. He gave a central place to the concrete land and in parallel also to the stratum of the Great Mother in the psyche as the basis for growth. He explicitly restored the female archetype and the mother goddess to their foundation, after his two predecessors, especially Freud, but also Jung, emphasized patriarchy. Neumann brought the “New Morality” to light in a new spirit, not as repression but rather standing against, confronting! He emphasized the new humanity, which actually comes via what is common to all human beings, without discrimination of race or religion, as he states in his book, The Crisis of Renewal[7]. And in his article, “Man and Meaning,” he said: "the process of transference and counter-transference is the occurrence based on the fundamental partnership of humanity, on being together, connected and included in an identical situation of life and in the same world, which exists within human beings as part of Ancient Man (Adam Kadmon, a concept in Kabbala) that is in all of us. This Ancient Man (a Man, and not a god) is the Self that lives within us as a center, which surrounds us as the wholeness of nature, and determines as fate our development in time.”[8]

            Most importantly of all, he understood the centrality of the connection between the ego and the totality – the creative unconscious – better than his predecessor, Jung. Neither the Self isolated from the ego (as with Jung) nor the ego itself with the superego (as with Freud) interested and fascinated him, but both together as a single, shared and complementary unit. The ego is first a growing psychic organ, then a field of consciousness, and then the Self-Ego axis. A "centroversion" acts with the soil and the land and with the field of the Self, which connect us outside beyond the archetypes.

     Thus Neumann emphasizes the ego no less that the Self, the ego and the totality, as well as the ego that is nourished, connected, and he sees the totality and the belonging between the two.

            Any change in breadth and transformation depends on this axis. And if anything comes between the Self and the ego, any complex, disturbance or disruption, we cannot say that the Self is in activation. For that reason Neumann investigated the history of consciousness so intensely, and the way in which consciousness, with the ego in its center, expands. What are the stages? What are the deceptions? Starting from the uroboric stage, along with the Great Mother, the war with the dragon, etc. – Neumann knew that without sufficient separation and reinforcement, and later without good connections, things will not go forward but will be dragged backward.

            Regarding the renewal of Israeli Judaism, Neumann became aware of the dangers inherent in that renewal and progress. Without recognition of ethics and without the separation of the feminine from the maternal or reduction of the importance of the maternal and feminine, which have serious presence in the psyche in experience, there is a danger of destruction. The neglect of the feminine and one-sided paternalism that causes imbalance and can bring about unconscious and uncontrolled entrapment in the earth archetype, something that we see here in our country.

            Similarly, he also warns that lack of sufficient separation in the psyche, especially in times of personal and also collective crisis, can bring danger of entrapment in the delusion of mysticism. This can appear both as something collective and messianic and uncontrolled, and also as something that floods from archaic uroboric regions, not as a true connection of the ego with the Self. In his work on the mystical man[9], he asks, what can be done so that the constantly living image of primordial wholeness will not infect humanity, since the magical temptation to return to the state of primal wholeness always exists? Clearly, in conditions of personal or collective distress this danger is far greater.

            In the wake of the false mysticism of the various “isms,” especially in Germany, Neumann learned to identify the situations in which regression to the old, to the earlier, always brings up false and destructive uroboric mysticism.  Similarly, though far from the same thing, the Zionist Jewish Israeli experience can be a collective return to old patterns. It is mysticism that does not bring innovation and development. On the contrary, it retreats and falls into the uroboros. Neumann goes on to say that uroboric mysticism is not one of change, and it is dis-integrative, fighting destructively in the world, and then the point of creative emptiness, which always exists in mysticism, which is always essentially creative, becomes the mouth of the Terrible Mother.

            There are three important points for understanding situations in which the negative numinous can appear: Uroboric mysticism, when insufficient separation has been made; absence of the feminine; distressed ego, or disconnection of the ego from the totality.

            As for Jung and his attachment to Germany, his being carried away by the process: before the war Jung saw something almost like a new religion, or a continuation of a new religious development. He spoke about the individuation of nations, about the Jews and the Germans, and for a long time he did not move away from his basic theses. It would be interesting to see what happened to him after the catastrophe, after he saw the destruction for its own sake, without any development or self. Is the Self truly present always and everywhere? What happens if the ego disintegrates? Is there really any such thing as a collective ego? Especially when all kind of complexes are running wild and take over

            Without doubt, after the war, and after having two heart attacks, mentioned incidentally in his letters, Jung took several steps backward, especially regarding the German nation and regarding evil in general. In his article, “After the Catastrophe,”[10]Jung wrote totally different things about the Germans, about Hitler and about evil, which again I cannot quote here. In light of all that he wrote, it would be interesting to know what Jung thought about himself and especially about the Self, which he had so deified before the war, after analyzing what happened in Germany, too.

            Strangest of all, though he tried, he did not manage to internalize the aspect of evil: It appears that Jung did understand something deeper about evil and to a certain degree it seems that he included some of this insight in his conceptions later on, but he did not understand his mistake and the complex to which he himself was subject, and what all of this touched on and activated within him. It appears that he did not

draw deep conclusions about the Self, about the processes that were separated from the Self, and the usurpation of the instincts that hide behind ideologies, which do not actually lead to development.

            If we strip Jung of the Archetype of the wise old man, were he to allow me to do so, he would appear as a person who slipped up, and, on the personal level, he does not seem to have taken full responsibility for what he did. Nor does it appear that he has processed the complex in which he himself was trapped: his implicit admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, the faith that something was happening that ultimately would be good, and the pure faith in the processes of individuation even of nations that bring destruction upon themselves and others. In 1950 he wrote a letter to Karl Jaspers, admitting that he was ashamed of his attitude toward Nazism. But, aside from shame, how did he understand it?

            In his famous work after the war, The Answer to Job, we see that Jung was still concerned with the central place of the archetype of the Self and its development, as symbolized by the concept of the changing god. The God who appears in Job is more anthropomorphic, whether good or evil, and in Jung's opinion he symbolizes development and drawing close to man, to humanity. We do not see any essential change his theory or in his conception of the Self in this book. Jung is ostensibly dealing with the shadow aspect of God, dealing with evil, but the centrality of the Self remains intact, even when there is splitting.

            In contrast, Neumann become extremely cautious, in relation to certain things that enter his theory. First, there is his conception of the important place of the stratum of the Great Mother, the basic stratum that gives grounding and inner and outer stability, but which can also swallow up and create instinctual pandemonium. Second, there is his conception of the ego and morality, the ego in which there is also a spark. Third, there is the Self, which is a field that represents totality within and without, and without the connection between inner and outer, there is a danger of negative Numenization and Uroboric mysticism.

            Questions remain :

             First, does the Self, in which we believe so strongly, always exist beyond the processes that take place when there is serious splitting between consciousness and the stratum of the Great Mother? Perhaps we continue to believe in the Self, although what speaks and influences the process is not the Self but the separation from the Great Mother!  Perhaps there is  also a detachment from the field of the Self, and therefore there is danger of being swallowed up in the Great Mother via a complex or a huge disruption. This can be misleading.

            Second, how is it at all possible to apply the Jungian theory about collective processes, such as what happened in Germany, or, though it is not the same thing, what is happening now in the new Land of Israel, which is seeking itself and Israeli Jewish identity? Are the concepts of the Self, the ego, and development toward individuation appropriate to the analysis of such processes?

            A final question for me is interesting, and the answer remains unclear: to what degree was there true dialogue between the two, of father and son, beyond transference? I did not receive sufficient indication that Jung took from Neumann, listened to him, and added to something of his own, from his theory. In one of the letters, in which Jung responds to Neumann's Origins and History of Consciousness, he writes that the only thing he did not agree with in the book were the passages that deal with and interpret phenomena by means of the Castration Complex (a Freudian term, of course). There is no such thing, says Jung. In the phenomena that you describe in the development of consciousness, it is a matter not of castration, but of sacrifice. Perhaps truly in the case of Jung and Neumann there was not a castration, but rather sacrifice, on the part of Neumann  the "son" of course

Avi Bauman

Tran. Jeffrey Green

Literature:

Baumann Avi:" Earth Mysticism and Peace" Harvest: international Journal for Jungian studies 52 no.2 pp76-90

rBrask Per K .Jung's Shadow: Two troubling Essays by Jung 2013 (Cgjungapageorg/learn/articles/analytical-psychology  pp-5-6

Jung C.G.:. "Wotan" Neue  Schweitzer  Rundschau 3 n.11 1936 and in CWX 203-18 Published in 1936, after the rise of the Nazis Translated by Elizabeth Welsh in Essays on contemporary events 1947

Jung C.G.  "After The Catastrophe"  Written in 1945 and a talk given by Jung in 1946, and broadcast by theBritish Broadcasting Corporation, calledThe Fight with the Shadow

Levin  Nicholas : Jung on war politics In Nazi Germany, exploring the theory of Archetype and collective , U Karnack Books 2009, pp 76-86

Liebcher m. Analytical Psychology in Exile:The correspondence of C.G. Jung and E.Neumann –N5, Princeton University Press 2015

 Neumann E. Der mytische Mensch 1949 in der Mensch, Eranos Jahre Book 1948, hebrew translation  Haadam Hamisti pp. 41-42  Resling 2007.

Neumann E.  Die Bedeutung des Erdarchetupe fur die Neuzeit 1954 in  Mensch und Erde Eranos Jahreboook 1953. Hebrew: Architip Haadama Baidan Hachadash in Mystical Man p 91 Resling 2007.

Neumann, E., In Honour of the Centenary of Freud’s Birth 1956, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 2, 1956.

Neumann E.Mensch und Sinn in  Der  schöopferische  Mensch Rhein Verlag,Zurich 1959 ,  Hebrew : Here am I, Essays on Man and Meaning  pp88-9  (Hebrew).Adam Umashmaut  in"  Hineni " Resling 2013.

Neumann E.  : Krise und Eneuerung (Crises and renewal) reprinted invol.5 of Neumann's Eranos Vortrage 1961

Singer& Kimbles                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              :The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society Paperback – July 1, Brunner Rutledge 2004

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