Neumann and Childhood

Introduction

Neumann Was A Man with a vision. It was first expressed in his Origins and history of consciousness and later continued in other volumes, among which is The child. The two significant books are complementary and round out a system of thought in as much as the first volume claimed to deal with phylogeny and the second with ontology. In this essay I shall consider only The child and an earlier essay (NEUMANN 48).

Neumann's thesis has been critically assessed by Geigerich (26) and The child has been sympathetically reviewed by Lyard (44) in the Cahiers de Psychologic Jungienne and in the same issue of that journal there are clinical illustrations of the way Neumann's ideas can be used. I shall refer to these publications as occasions arise.

Neumann's writings on childhood have appealed to those with Jungian training who have felt the lack of a theory of child development in the Jungian scheme of things—it was a hiatus that I myself also started to fill (FORDHAM 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22). Neumann has interested Jungians in childhood and has contributed to altering a bias that has been very difficult to change. That is a merit of his work.

Neumann's Style

Neumann's undoubtedly strong appeal is partly due to his style of writing: it is often poetic and colourful, while his use of mythology touches on and stimulates preconscious processes in the reader. To enjoy him it is, however, necessary to keep one's critical faculties in abeyance, for he often writes ambiguously, contradicts himself, and it is frequently unclear whether he is writing abstractly, metaphorically or symbolically. It is stated, for instance, in one place that the self is a psychobiological unity but in others the ‘mother is the child's self, the child has a ‘body self’ and there is a ‘patriarchal self as well. Those statements are symbolic, and suggest a trinitarian myth at work.

Then there is his dogmatic style which, combined with his repetitiveness, give the impression that if sta