ABSTRACT
The gist of Erich Neumann’s development theory, in his words, is “Away from the Mother-world! Forward to the Father-world!” ([1949] 1970, p. 402) – from the matriarchate to the patriarchate. At the beginning there is only small masculine germ in the Maternal Uroboros. It is a spark of consciousness slowly developing and separating itself from the symbiotic matrix, becoming the ego of the individual, and patriarchal culture, in the collective society. According to Neumann, culture is created through a process of cultivation of the masculine aspects of both individual and society. As he put it in The Fear of the Feminine (1994, p. 28):
Sociologically and politically it is expressed in the development of a patriarchal culture . . . The patriarchal line of the development of consciousness leads to a condition where patriarchal-masculine values are dominant, values that are often conceived in direct opposition to those of the archetypal Feminine and of the unconscious. This development, directed by the archetypally conditioned cultural canon . . . leads to the separation of consciousness from the unconscious, to the evolution of the independent conscious system with a masculine ego as the centre, to a suppression of the unconscious, and to its greatest possible repression from the ego’s field of vision.
When I mention male and female aspects, or masculinity and femininity, or father and mother realms or worlds, I refer to these aspects in the collective (culture, community), or in the individual aspects of the psyche of both men and women.