After Eighty Years of Slumber: The Rediscovery of Erich Neumann’s Jewish Corpus

Abstract

Abstract While Erich Neumann’s contributions to depth psychology and his celebrated Eranos lectures are well known, his Jewish writings from the 1930s have been hidden from public view for eighty years until their recent publication. This paper introduces three works that have sparked a renaissance of interest in Neumann as a Jewish thinker. These include a monograph, Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif (2015), a two-volume opus, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness (2019), and the correspondence between Neumann and Jung, Analytical Psychology in Exile (2105). Neumann asserts that Hasidism was a forerunner to modern depth psychology and claims that both disciplines affirm the primacy of the individual and the integration of masculine and feminine modes of being in a fully-realized, individuated personality.