The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume Two: Hasidism

by Erich Neumann, Ann Conrad Lammers (Editor)

The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume Two: Hasidism is the second volume, fullyannotated, of a major, previously unpublished, two-part work by Erich Neumann (1905–1960). It was written between 1940 and 1945, after Neumann, then a young philosopher and physician and freshly trained as a disciple of Jung, fled Berlin to settle in Tel Aviv. He finished this work at the end of World War II. Although he never published it, he kept it the rest of his life.

Volume Two, Hasidism, is devoted to the psychological and spiritual wisdom embodied in Jewish spiritual tradition. Relying on Jung’s concepts and Buber’s Hasidic interpretations, Neumann seeks alternatives to the legalism and anti-feminine bias that he says have dominated collective Judaism since the Second Temple. He argues that modern Jews can develop psychological wholeness through an appropriation of Hasidic legends, Talmudic texts, and Kabbalistic mysteries, including especially the Zohar. Exclusively, this volume includes a foreword by Moshe Idel. An appendix, Neumann’s four-lecture series from the 1940s, gives a glimpse of his intended, unpublished Part Three.

These volumes anticipate Neumann’s later works, including Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, The Origins and History of Consciousness, and The Great Mother. In Volume Two, Hasidism, his concept of the ego–Self axis is developed in clearly psychological terms. Four previously unpublished essays, appended to Volume Two, illustrate Neumann’s developmental psychology, including his theme of primary and secondary personalization. This unique work will appeal to Jungian analysts and psychotherapists in training and in practice, historians of psychology, Jewish scholars, biblical historians, teachers of comparative religion, as well as academics and students.

334 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 24, 2019

About the author

Erich Neumann (Hebrew: אריך נוימן) was a psychologist, writer, and one of Carl Jung's most gifted students.
Neumann received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1927. He practiced analytical psychology in Tel Aviv from 1934 until his death in 1960. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute. He also lectured frequently in England, France and the Netherlands, and was a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and president of the Israel Association of Analytical Psychologists.
Erich Neumann contributed greatly to the field of developmental psychology and the psychology of consciousness and creativity. Neumann had a theoretical and philosophical approach to analysis, contrasting with the more clinical concern in England and the United States. His most valuable contribution to psychology was the empirical concept of "centroversion", a synthesis of extra- and introversion. However, he is best known for his theory of feminine development, a theory formulated in numerous publications, most notably The Great Mother. His works also elucidate the way mythology throughout history reveals aspects of the development of consciousness that are parallel in both the individual and society as a whole.