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Eric Neumann, the most distinguished analytical psychologist of his generation and the possessor of a creative gift second only to Jung's, died at the height of his powers in 1960 at the age of fifty-five. The body of work he produced in this relatively short life is of the first importance; at least one major study, The Origins and History of Consciousness, can legitimately take its place at the very highest level of psychoanalytic thought. Thus it has been a most welcome discovery in the last few years that more of Neumann's work had remained untranslated and unpublished in English than had first been imagined. This volume is the most recent posthumous collection.
The major essay in the book is an early one, Neumann's analysis of Kafka's The Trial, begun when he was in his twenties (before he had ever encountered the thought of Jung) and left awaiting revision at his death. Though one familiar with the later Neumann can rather easily intuit the lines of certain changes he might have made in the text, one also recognizes his characteristic mature strengths in evidence: precision of formulation, meticulousness of analysis, depth of concern with the role of creative art, penetrating insight into how the modern psyche meets the problem of transcendance, and awareness of the inter-connectedness of the psychological and the moral dimensions.
The basic problem for modern man, as Neumann interprets Kafka, is that he has lost his relationship to transpersonal reality. The