Introduction to this new edition of Neumann’s The Child
FOREWORD
It is a pleasure to write an introduction to this new edition of Neumann’s The Child, which has been out of print for some time. This book was first published in a German edition in 1963 and appeared in English translation in 1973.
Neumann’s all-embracing archetypal perspective continues to inspire and inform depth psychological studies in child development.
Neumann is widely known and respected for his writings on creativity, culture, and the moral sense, but the book of his that has had the greatest impact on analytical psychology is no doubt
The Origins and History of Consciousness.
There Neumann took on the daunting task of discerning in ancient mythology evidence of the development of human consciousness.
“It is the task of this book,” he writes in the introduction, “to show that a series of archetypes is a main constituent of mythology, that they stand in an organic relation to one another, and that their stadia} succession determines the growth of consciousness.”
Neumann goes on to say that “the individual ego consciousness has to pass through the same archetypal stages which determined the evolution of consciousness in the life of humanity.
The individual has in his own life to follow the road that humanity has trod before him, leaving traces of its journey in the archetypal sequence of the mythological images.” In this statement we recognize the task that Neumann set himself in The Child: to show how the development of the child’s ego-consciousness recapitulates the same archetypal stages and symbolic images that appear in ancient mythologies.
This idea is already implicit in Jung’s theory of analytical psychology, but The Origi,ns and History of Consciousness and I, I The Child were the first attempts to demonstrate the hypothesis.
In retrospect, we can see that The Child was a natural outgrowth of The Origins and History of Consciousness. It is apparent that, from the beginning, the themes of these two books were inextricably entwined in Neumann’s thought.
In a foreword to The Origins and History of Consciousness, Jung expressed his great admiration, and perhaps a tinge of envy as well, for what Neumann had accomplished. The book begins, he says, ‘)ust where I, too, if I were granted a second lease of life, would start to gather up the disjecta membra of my own writings to sift out all those ‘beginnings without continuations’ and knead them into a whole.”
Jung notes that Neumann begins “at the very place where I unwittingly made landfall on the new continent long ago, namely the realm of matriarchal symbolism; and, as a conceptual framework for his discoveries, the author uses a symbol whose significance first dawned on me in my recent writings
on the psychology of alchemy: the uroboros.”
Without a doubt Jung would have been just as pleased with The Child. For it also exemplifies a concept that Jung expressed early on but, caught in the onrush of his creative daimon, unavoidably left undeveloped-the mother-child relation as a participation mystique.
For Neumann the terms participation mystique and unconscious identity, which come from Lucien Levy-Bruhl, express the quality of union or merger that characterizes the mother-child relationship in the earliest period of infancy, the uroboric stage.
He concludes that “formulated in these terms the psychic situation of the infant is interpreted not as an act of identification, but as an unconscious identity, that is, as a passive state” (The Child, p.15).
The mother, he says, “dominates the early development of the human individual just as the matriarchal world, in which the unconscious is paramount and ego-consciousness is still undeveloped, dominates the psychology of primitive cultures” (p. 7).
The uroboros, the mythological image of the snake with its tail in its mouth, “as the Great Round, in whose womb the ego-germ lies sheltered, is the characteristic symbol of the uterine situation in which there is not yet a clearly delimited child personality confronting a human and extra-human environment.
This undelimited state characteristic of the uterine embryonic situation is largely, though not fully, preserved after birth.” (p. 10).
Fundamental to Neumann’s archetypal theory is the mother’s innate, instinctive response to the infant, not only in humans but in the mammalian species as a whole.
For Neumann the mother-child relationship is, from the beginning, “a relationship between two living beings whose instinctive tendency impels them to seek fulfillment in each other and who, just as in the instinct-directed drive of man and women to unite, are oriented toward one another” (p. 83).
However, it is the mother’s instinctive reactions, he says, which are the foundation of the primal relationship: “They guarantee the stability and self-evident character of the Eros-bond attaching the mother to her child” (p. 24).
This is so throughout the animal world, in which the female shows “tenderness, readiness to make sacrifices, and the will to defend the life of the young” (ibid.).
The instinctual basis of this response seems to lie in the proportions of the baby’s head and in its helplessness. Neumann quotes Niko Tinbergen: “a short face in relation to a large forehead, prominent cheeks” (ibid.).
Important also are the infantile body movements. The presence of these features, even in young animals, releases tender parental feelings, and where such features are lacking this reaction does not occur.
It is of equal importance, of course, that there be an innate response of the infant to the mother. As the Divine Child is constellated in the mother, so also is the mother archetype constellated in the infant.
At around one to three months of age the infant smiles for the first time with clear-eyed recognition of the mother’s face, and frequently of her voice as well.
There are, of course, other indications of the child’s “expectations” of a mother. The infant “roots” for the mother’s nipple and sucks on it, and within hours or days it has
recognized the mother’s smell.
Thus Neumann was on solid ground when he wrote many years ago:
The mother constellates the archetypal field and evokes the archetypal image of the mother in the child psyche, where it rests, ready to be evoked and to function.
This archetypal image evoked in the psyche then sets in motion a complex interplay of psychic functions in the child, which is the starting point for essential psychic developments between the ego and the unconscious.
These developments, like those embedded in the organism, remain relatively independent of the mother’s individual behavior, provided that the mother lives with her child in accordance with her archetypal role. (p. 24)
Neumann was perhaps the first depth psychologist to grasp the full significance of the extra-uterine period, the first twelve to fourteen months of the newborn infant’s life.
He emphasized the important fact, often neglected by students of child development, that the human infant is born approximately a year early in comparison to the maturity at birth of other higher primates.
To achieve a comparable degree of maturity at birth the human infant would probably have to spend at least another year in the womb. This neotony-retarded development-is related to the evolution of the brain.
The brain of the human fetus has grown so large by the end of the third trimester of pregnancy that birth must occur at that time. As a consequence of its “premature” birth, the human infant must acquire during its first year of life many of the adaptive skills that other primates have at birth, such as the ability to walk and cling to the mother.
Archetypal development begins in the nurturing, protective atmosphere of the womb and then, following birth, continues in what Adolf Portmann has dubbed the “social womb” of the mother-child relationship.
Just as development in the womb takes place in universal stages of physical and neurological growth, the mother-child relationship is programmed to continue the archetypal development of the child, although now with the additional impact of social and cultural factors.
By adopting Portmann’s term, the social womb, Neumann wished to emphasize this important fact.
The evolutionary significance of neotony seems to be
linked to the social nature of the mammalian species. With the appearance of the emotions as a more flexible instinctual system, there was an increasing need for the adaptation of infants to the social life of the group, upon which their survival depended.
Prolonged infancy provides this opportunity for maturation within the social group. The human infant must learn all the skills that prepare it for a human life of cultural as well as “natural” development.
Neumann highlights the significance of human neotony with respect to the social collective:
In the latter part of its embryonic life the human child is withdrawn from the maternal hands of nature and entrusted to the human mother. The child’s primal relationship to its mother is more than a primary relationship, for thanks to this relationship the child, even before its “true” birth at the age of one year, is molded by human culture, since the mother lives in a cultural collective whose language and values unconsciously but effectively influence the child’s development. (p. 8)
Having established the reciprocal archetypal responses of mother and infant as his basis, Neumann could now follow the course of the child’s development within the primal relationship of mother and child.
Sad to say, owing to Neumann’s untimely death in 1960, this book is unfinished. The editors decided, wisely I believe, to leave it in its first-draft state with all the virtues and the faults inherent in such a manuscript.
On the one hand, we have the rare opportunity to experience the enthusiasm and driving energy that often characterize a first, unedited draft.
On the other hand, we are left with the inevitable repetitions and incomplete treatment of certain issues. Notably lacking is a full treatment of the specific character of feminine development.
The editors did, however, add a very brief and general summary of this topic, drawn from the author’s other writings on the subject. Neumann was well aware that understanding the archetypal differences in the developtment of males and females is of great significance. He realized that the girl’s relationship to the mother is in fundamental ways different from the boy’s, and he had planned to write more about this:
“The difference in the development of the girl will at least be touched upon in a later section of this book, since special importance must be attached to the mother-daughter relationship as the first phase of the specifically feminine development” (p. 95).
In view of the book’s unfinished form, a few hints and guidelines that have been helpful in my reading of the book may also be of some assistance to the reader.
First, a few suggestions on how to read Neumann. The approach is through the imagination as well as the intellect. When Neumann says that the mother-child relationship is archetypal, he is saying: imagine the field of psychic energy that is elicited between the mother and the child and see what images come to your mind.
He encourages us to return as best we can to the state of mind that Gaston Bachelard calls poetic revery, and this we shall find is as close as we can ever get to the original state that Neumann calls the matriarchate,
in which Eros and the imagination hold sway. Fantasy reigns, he says, so free up your own images of that first stage of the mother-child relationship.
The matriarchal consciousness of the child is most clearly revealed by the role of fantasy and its close relative, play. Fantasy is by no means identical with a wishful inner pleasure principle; rather, it is an inner sense organ that perceives and expresses inner worlds and laws as the outward sense organs perceive and express the outside world and its laws.
The world of play is of extreme importance not only for children but also for the adults of all cultures; it is not a world to be transcended. It is especially important for children. Only an individual embedded in this symbolic reality of play can become a complete human being. (p. 70)
This quotation encapsulates clearly and fully Neumann’s deep understanding of the inestimable importance of play and fantasy in the life of the child and the adult.
Neumann asks us to imagine: what has been set loose between the mother and child? The infant evokes the child archetype in the mother and the mother evokes the mother archetype in the infant. The mother is seized by loving, nurturant feelings for the helpless, adorable infant, and the infant is seized by the instinct to root for the nipple and then to swallow the mother’s milk.
But within one to three months the infant has a startling revelation. It discriminates, out of the void of unconsciousness, the sound of the mother’s voice and the sight of her face, and responds with its first clear-eyed smile of recognition.
We may imagine that, for the infant, this is a vision of great beauty and wonder, a revelation of the visual-auditory archetypal image of the mother, the Great Goddess, a vision our dreams ever seek to recover.
This revelation signals the approaching end of the earliest uroboric state, and leads on to the ensuing stages of development.
It is important to keep in mind that, for Neumann, the primal relationship of mother and child is the basis for all successful normal development, and, as well, for the ways in which pathological development may occur (leaving aside, of course, genetic inheritance of defects, traumatic events, and the like).
In the first four chapters he is primarily occupied with the infant’s development from birth to around twelve to fourteen months of age, although he edges toward the time when the integral ego and the Self are constellated, around two years of age.
The emphasis in these early chapters is almost totally on the mother-child relationship in its normal development, in its disturbances, and in the gradual transition from the matriarchate to the patriarchate.
I would draw the reader’s attention to the fact that these first four chapters are concerned not so much with ego development as with “the relation, not of the ego, but of the total Self to body, mother, and mother as representative of the world.”
The emphasis here is on what may be called the “Self functions,” that is to say, centroversion, automorphism, and the ego-Self-axis of identity.
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The stages of ego development are taken up in chapter 5, which is in part a recapitulation of the first four chapters, as well as an extension into later stages of development.
For a frame of reference I would direct the reader’s attention to the little outline of stages of ego development on page 139.
Two useful additions to this list would be some guidelines as to the child’s approximate age at each of these stages, and the inclusion of the earliest pre-ego substage of development.
Neumann makes it clear that as he sees it, the first stage-the phallic-chthonian with its two substages-encompasses the period from birth to twelve to fourteen months of age.
It would be appropriate to add the uroboric state as the first of three substages of the phallic-chthonian.
We then would have the substages: (a) uroboric from birth to two or three months, (b) vegetative from two or three months to six or seven months, and (c) animal from six or seven months to twelve to fourteen months.
As for other age dating, I might suggest that the magic-phallic is roughly sixteen months to four years of age, while the magic-warlike is approximately age four to six or seven years.
The solar-warlike and the solar-rational encompass the periods of seven to twelve, and twelve through adolescence, respectively.
These age datings are approximations and may vary considerably in individual cases.
Many of Neumann’s terms are, of course, taken from mythology as well as archaeological and religious historical sources.
They are evocative on the one hand and off-putting on the other. For example, the symbol of the uroboros is most often represented by the circular image of a snake with its tail in its mouth.
But in The Origins and History of Consciousness, the frontispiece, entitled “The Uroboros,” shows the infant god Vishnu holding his foot to his mouth as he sucks on one of his toes. It suggests that the infant while sucking its fingers or toes incarnates the image of the mythic uroboros.
As a symbol of the remote past the uroboros represents the “wholeness” of that state of consciousness in which self and other are undifferentiated, a state characteristic of the initial pre-ego stage.
In the same light we may understand the infant’s behavior in the discovery of sucking its thumb as representing the first synthesis of the psyche following upon the rude disruption of life within the womb, an existence that had represented a paradisiacal absorption in the purely unconscious processes of life.
The natural process of uniting thumb and mouth seems to be an important early developmental event. Not only the mouth, but the thumb, too—-inner and outer-reverberates to the pleasurable, self-comforting sensations of rhythmic sucking.
Following the uroboric state (birth to two or three months) are the later phallic-chthonian stages, the Mistress of the Plants and the Mistress of the Animals.
These terms may easily evoke images of the early stages of infancy when the child is at first in a largely vegetative state and then gradually becomes more active and is able to sit up and eventually to walk.
On the other hand the term phallic-chthonian, which encompasses these two substages, is hardly an everyday term and requires the definition and amplification that Neumann provides.
Still it remains an unwieldy phrase, not immediately evocative of the child’s overall behavior during that period of development.
Similarly with the magic-phallic stage.
This term is evocative in its magical implications, which are readily recognized in the behavior of the child as it progresses from the stage of consciousness of “pretend,” around fourteen to sixteen months of age, to the stage of development of the symbol at about age three.
As we know, this stage includes the beginings of such “magical” fantasies as the imaginary or symbolic companion.
But here too implications of the term phallic may not be immediately self-evident to the observer of an infant’s behavior.
Connections to the mythological image of the phallus can be made if we follow Neumann’s interpretations, though, and without question we can support the choice of the term by examples.
(One of the most famous in depth psychology is Jung’s dream at around four or five years of age of an “underground phallus on a golden throne.”)
The enormous creativity that children show once they have become conscious of their imagination is, of course, reason enough for a term that emphasizes fecundity.
Moreover, once we have Neumann’s concepts in mind, our understanding of the child’s behavior may actually be enriched.
It is at just such places in the book that we become aware of how much Neumann’s perspective is influenced by his investigations of the mythological images reflecting the phylogenetic stages of development in human consciousness.
Nothing I could say in further explication could be more productive than for the reader to turn to Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness.
- A perusal of that book in parallel with The Child could be particularly illuminating.
Perhaps this little excursion into Neumann’s mode of presentation throws some additional light on one of the more important qualities of this book, and of Neumann’s approach to his subject: he seeks always to keep the reader in touch with the enormous significance he gives to the archetypal viewpoint and its representation in the images of mythology.
The effort required of the reader is well worthwhile. The Child offers an unexcelled opportunity for coming to grips with Neumann’s basic viewpoint.
The rewards are great, for in this work the ground plan for a comprehensive archetypal theory of human development has been laid down.
In closing I can only agree with his lifelong friend and colleague Gerhard Adler, who wrote in the foreword to Neumann’s Creative Man:
“His work did not spring from his intellect [alone] but from a deep and living connection with the unconscious sources of creativity.” ~Louis H. Stewart, The Child, Page vi-1
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