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Erich Neumann and the Crisis of Western Ethics

Author: Avihu Zakai

Published in: Society | Issue 3/2020

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Abstract

This article explores Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (Tiefenpsychologie und Neue Ethik, 1949). Nine years after Erich Neumann left Nazi Germany for Palestine in 1934, he began writing Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. In 1942, he was living in Tel Aviv when the news came that Panzerarmee Afrika under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had started the second phase of its advance toward Egypt, aiming to seize the oilfields all the way to the Caspian Sea. Already aware of the Holocaust, the small groups of Jewish settlers in Palestine could only expect the worst. In this crucial existential moment, with Rommel “at the door”, as Neuman put it, he began Depth Psychology to reveal the psychological antecedents of the triumph of Nazism and the horrors of the Second World War.

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Tiefenpsychologie und neue Ethik (Zurich: Rascher, 1949); Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Eugene Rolfe (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969).

The first volume was Contributions to the Depth Psychology of the Jewish Man and the Problem of Revelation, and the second, Hasidism and Its Psychological Relevance for Jewry. See Martin Liebscher, “Uncertain Friends in Particular Matters: The Relationship between C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann,” in Turbulent Times, Creative Minds: Erich Neumann and C. G. Jung in Relationship (1933–1960), eds. E. Shalit and M, Stein (Asheville, NC: Chiron, 2016), 27.

Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).

Neumann, Depth Psychology, back cover.

Micha Neumann, quoted in Aviva Lori, “Jung at Heart,” Haaretz, November 2017; https://www.haaretz.com/jung-at-heart-1.148506.

See Scholem’s obituary for Neumann; http://www.erelshalit.com/2014/07/gershom-scholem-obituary-for-erich.html.

Adler, quoted in Martin Liebscher, “Introduction,” to Analytical Psychology in Exile: The Correspondence of C. J. Jung and Erich Neumann, ed. Liebscher, trans. Heather McCartney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), xii.

An important discussion of Jung and Neumann’s correspondence can be found in Nancy Swift Furlotti, “Companion on the Way: Consciousness in Conflict,” in Turbulent Times, 45–69.

Neumann to Jung, 15 November 1939, and 26 July 1950, in ibid., 153; 267.

28 December 1953, ibid., 301.

10 October 1935, ibid., 114.

23 July 1937, ibid., 131.

1 February 1947, ibid., 178.

26 July 1950, ibid., 266–67.

See http://www.depthinsights.com/blog/the-c-g-jung-erich-neumann-connection-an-interview-with-dr-lance-owens/; and Tamar Kron, “Erich Neumann and Hasidism,” in Turbulent Times, 367–83.

See http://www.depthinsights.com/blog/the-c-g-jung-erich-neumann-connection-an-interview-with-dr-lance-owens/.

Neumann to Jung, 11October 1958, in Liebscher, Analytical Psychology in Exile, 342.

Neumann, Depth Psychology, 140.

Neumann’s book “caused harsh reactions and criticism in Zurich,” despite the fact that Jung praised it. See Liebscher, “Uncertain Friends,” 27.

Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 12, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull (1953; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 188.

Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), xv.

Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955; rpt. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963), v.

Ibid., xli.

Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 114. The psychotherapist Robert H. Hopcke called The Origins and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother, “Neumann’s most enduring contribution to Jungian thought” (Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality [Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1989], 70–72).

Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, xv.

Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, vol. 3, Freud, Adler, and Jung (New York: Routledge, 1980), 353–54.

Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 289.

Neumann, Depth Psychology, back cover.

Neumann to Jung, 25 May 1957, in Liebscher, Analytical Psychology in Exile, 324.

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, 1939–1945 (New York: Allen Lane, 2008), 467.

Neumann to Jung, 14 June 1957, in Liebscher, Analytical Psychology in Exile, 331.

Ibid., 333.

See Avihu Zakai, Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology: The Humanist Tradition in Peril (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017); The Pen Confronts the Sword: Exiled German Scholars Challenge Nazism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018); and David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai, Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich: Baron, Popper, Strauss, Auerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Adler, “Foreword to this Edition,” in Neumann, Depth Psychology, 7–8.

Ibid., 8.

Ibid.

Wilhelm Dilthey, German historian, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, coined the concept of Ansatzpunkt in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin (1914; rpt. Göttingen: Wandenhoeck Ruprecht, 1968).

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcot (1944; rpt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 165; emphasis added.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 556; emphasis added.

Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (1965; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 30; emphasis added.

Adler, “Foreword,” 8; emphasis added. On intellectual exiles from Nazi Germany who strove to explain history as a series of turning points, see Zakai, Erich Auerbach; Pen Confronts the Sword; and Weinstein and Zakai, Jewish Exiles.

Buber, I and Thou (Ich und Du) (1923; rpt. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937). According to Buber’s biographer, Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Buber and Neumann knew … and corresponded with each other. Neumann regarded himself a disciple of Buber. He wrote at least one essay on one of Buber’s Hasidic stories” (letter to the author, 11 November 2017).

Neumann, cited in Adler, “Foreword,” 8.

Adler, “Foreword,” 8; emphasis added.

Neumann, quoted in Adler, ibid., 9.

Jung, cited in Adler, ibid., 9.

Cassirer, The Myth of the State (1946; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 280.

Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1941), 8.

Cassirer, Myth of the State, 3.

Adorno, “Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler,” Kenyon Review, 9, 1 (1947): 158.

It is very interesting to compare Neumann’s vision of the “brotherhood of man” with the invention of Esperanto by the Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof (1859–1917). Zamenhof grew up fascinated by the idea of a world without war and believed it could happen with the help of a new international auxiliary language, Esperanto, which he developed in 1873. See Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan, 2016); and Joan Acocella, “Return to Babel: The Rise and Fall of Esperanto,” New Yorker, 31 October 2016, 90–95.

Title: Erich Neumann and the Crisis of Western Ethics
Author: Avihu Zakai
Publication date: 19-05-2020
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 3/2020
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00487-2

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