Below is some notes I took on an essay written by academic Camilla Paglia on Erich Neumann. You can find the full text here.
My excerpts predominantly focus on Paglia’s critique of poststructuralism and Neumann’s theory of The Great Mother.
Poststructuralism and postmodernism has given adolescents a sanitised and flawed higher education experience.
Individuals such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are false Gods worshipped by today’s academics. For those who don’t know, the pair are recognised as being the figureheads of postmodernist thought.
Paglia advocates that students should grapple with dangerous texts in order to have a rich education. For her, this involved reading writers such as Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown and Alan Watts.
Another writer who influence Paglia was Erich Neumann a “product of German classical philology.”
Neumann was a student at the height of the Weimar Republic years in Germany, and studied at the University of Erlangen in Nuremberg. He wrote his dissertation on Johann Arnold Kanne, a Christian philosopher with a particular interest in Jewish Mysticism. Neumann also studied alongside Carl Jung in Zurich after pursuing his interest in psychoanalysis at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Neumann went on to practise psychoanalysis in Tel-Aviv.
His first book was Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), and he also wrote the The Origins and History of Consciousness which has been endorsed previously by Jordan Peterson as one of the great books on consciousness. A key idea from his writing is that “each individual's psychological growth recapitulates the history of humanity.”
However, Paglia argues that Neumann ought to be remembered the most for The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955). The book is distinctly visual and symbolic, perhaps unsurprisingly.
Paglia locates a quote from Neumann discussing Sigmund Freud - “Freud opened the way for the liberation of man from the oppression of the old father figure, to which he himself remained deeply fixated.”
Paglia - “Neumann implied that the therapeutic Freud was too fixed on social adaptation and that he trapped patients in their private past.”
Paglia argues that Freud’s backward views on women has led to many mistakenly dismissing all of his views. With Freud, we have thrown the baby out of the bathwater. She claims that his theories to do with the psyche and dreams “radically transformed modern art and thought.”
Neumann said there were four stages of female psychological development:
The matriarchal stage - characterised by the fact that the ego and the unconscious are still fused - this, according to Paglia, resembles the message of William Blake’s poem The Sick Rose
The stage of spiritual invasion - characterised by a domination of the Great Father archetype.
The stage of masculine integration - characterised by visualisations of a rescuing hero who “liberates the young woman from the controlling father.”
The stage of authenticity - characterised by the woman discovering her “authentic self and voice.”
Paglia argues that the concept of motherhood is now far removed from the modern curriculum. The concept of gender has similarly been diluted and reduced to academic sidelines.
Paglia - Postmodernism “has nothing useful to say about the great religious and mythological themes that have dominated the history of world art.”
“The ancient Great Mother was a dangerously dual figure, both benevolent and terrifying, like the Hindu goddess Kali. Neumann saw this clearly.”
There is neither “moralism nor political agenda” operating in Neumann’s work.