Jungian analysts Erel Shalit and Joseph Cambray contemplate the work of Jung’s colleague and friend, Erich Neumann

Posted by Erik Davis on Jun 20, 2016 3:44:16 PM

In this fascinating conversation, Jungian analysts Erel Shalit and Joseph Cambray contemplate the work of Jung’s colleague and friend, Erich Neumann, a Jewish analyst who introduced analytical psychology to Israel when he fled there from Germany during the years surrounding World War II. Recent publication of the correspondence between Jung and Neumann has fueled a revival of sorts into Neumann’s works, including significant contributions such as The Great Mother, Jacob and Esau, Introversion and Extroversion, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, and Art and the Unconscious. Neumann, whom Jung referred to as a “companion on the road,” had a strong influence on Jung’s own work, compelling him to revise “An Answer to Job,” among others.

Neumann, whose work deals extensively with creativity, the feminine, and the roots of the Jewish spirit, found an intellectual and spiritual home at Eranos in Switzerland, where Jung and other intellectuals of the time also lectured, and many of his major works pertain to annual lectures he gave there until 1960, just before his death at age 55. Neumann also wrote a great deal about the roots of Jewish consciousness, drawing from the ancestral sources and from the “earth of the land,” notes Erel Shalit.

In the interview, Shalit and Cambray discuss little known details about Neumann’s life and work, his motivations for writing, and his art work and paintings, deemed “raw,” “intriguing,” and “expressed without censorship,” and how they may relate to his own dreams and active imaginations.” Neumann brings significant aspects well worth raising into our present consciousness, Shalit suggests, “concepts, ideas, thoughts, notions that have universal value for our world today.”

Pacifica Graduate Institute is hosting Creative Minds in Dialogue: The Relationship between C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann,”a symposium in Santa Barbara, CA, June 24-26, 2016. Speakers include Murray Stein, Erel Shalit, Lance Owens, Nancy Furlotti, and other internationally acclaimed scholars.