Erich Neumann and the Crisis of Western Ethics

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.