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The Child

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Readers familiar with Neumann's approach in "The Origins and History of Consciousness" and "The Fear of the Feminine" will recognize the same methodology applied here to the psychology of the developing child.

This is a posthumously published and not fully completed work written by Erich Neumann, referred to by some as "one of Jung's most creative students."

Some readers will not accept in their entirety Neumann's particular views regarding religious and gender-related issues. Nonetheless the book has some worthwhile insights.

From the back cover: "The Child examines the structure and dynamics of the earliest developments of ego and individuality. The author traces this development from the primal relationship of mother and child to the full emergence of personality through the child's relationship with its body, its Self, others, and "being-in-the-world." He shows that this movement corresponds to the development of culture from the psychological matriarchate, in which the mother archetype is primary, to the psychological patriarchate, dominated by the father archetype. This transition, Neumann argues, is indispensable to the process by which humanity achieves consciousness."

Book chapters: Foreword; The Primal Relationship; Primal Relationship and Development of the Ego-Self Relationship; Disturbances of the Primal Relationship and their Consequences; From Matriarchate to Patriarchate; The Stages in the Child's Ego-Development; The Patriarchate; Notes; Glossary; Index.

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul"

This is one of the classics in Jungian child psychotherapy and a source of inspiration for Dora Kalff's sandplay that was also a source of lengthy criticism by the developmental analyst Michael Fordham. The main question for any reader of Neumann is whether his hypotheses are empirically verifiable or not. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the child's life, as Neumann asserts, then there must be a way through which the archetypes in question are "released." In The Child Neumann refers to the way of archetypal release as "personal evocation." "The evocation of archetypes ... always includes and presupposes an outside stimulus--a world factor" (82-85). Neumann postulates a basic biopsychic "body-Self" (34) as the blueprint for what he calls the "five stages" of a child's ego development. He suggests that the development of the child personality from the matriarchate to the patriarchate is mirrored in the following five phases: 1) The phallic-chthonian stage of the ego with a) vegetative and b) animal symbols; 2) The magic-phallic stage of the ego; 3) The magic-warlike stage of the ego; 4) The solar-warlike stage of the ego; and 5) The solar-rational stage of the ego (139). The central thesis in The Child centers on the "phallic stages of the ego." By "phallic" Neumann does not mean the sexually accented ego, but "ego activities that depend largely on the totality of the body, on the accentuation of the experience of the body" in both genders in boys and girls (137). The prototype for the phallic thrusting force of the ego that moves forward into consciousness is found in the birth of the hero. The hero recapitulates ontogeny as an archetypal image released through evocation when the child's ego takes a heroic stance towards the first parents and this stance towards the Great Mother and "the ego's war of liberation is directed against her" (139). Of particular relevance, I think, is what Neumann calls the "phallic-chthonian stage of the ego" under "b) animal" and in the "magic-phallic stage of the ego." Neumann says that these two stages of a child's ego development correspond in the evolution and history of human consciousness to the emergence of the father principle with the figure of the medicine man, chief, or shaman, as the ancestral leader of the male hunting groups during the reign of the Great Mother religions. He speaks of a particular stage of phylogeny during this transitional period when the "terrible Masculine" emerged alongside an equally death-wielding-aspect of the Terrible Mother, and this violent masculine principle was directed, he says, against animals and Nature. In this stage of phylogeny that is apparently recapitulated in the ontology of every childhood, the masculine aspect of the child's ego personality becomes identical with "the killing symbol of the weapon as a destructive phallus. This symbol," he conjectures was "introjected by the male group" (156) in pre-history, and the phallic, thrusting, ritual-weapon eventually was used by the male group to turn aggressively against the matriarchy, leading ultimately to the triumph of men's societies and in turn, to the violent emergence of the patriarchate. Neumann says that the "fecundating phallus" is not only a symbol of "generation" but also as a "penetrating weapon a symbol for killing" (188). This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in Jungian psychology, child psychotherapy, or the origins and history of consciousness. Whether his hypotheses prove to hold over time or not, this is a brilliant work by one of the greatest theoretical thinkers who was at Jung's side when he laid down the cornerstone of analytical psychology.