BOLLINGEN SERIES XLVII ISIS Tomb of Thutmosis IV, Thebes, XVIII Dynasty THE GREAT MOTHER AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARCHETYPE BY ERICH NEUMANN Translated from the German by RALPH MANHEIM With a new foreword by MARTIN LIEBSCHER BOLLINGEN SERIES XLVII BOLLINGEN SERIES XLVII PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright 1955 © 1963 by Bollingen Foundation Inc., New York, NY; Copyright © Renewed 1983 by Princeton University Press New foreword by Martin Liebscher copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved press.princeton.edu Second Edition, 1963 First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1972 First Princeton Classics Edition, with a new foreword by Martin Liebscher, 2015 This is the forty-seventh in a series of works sponsored by Bollingen Foundation Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16607-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930406 Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To C. G. Jung FRIEND AND MASTER IN HIS EIGHTIETH YEAR FOREWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION “Bachofen is overall a treasure chest of psychological knowledge, if one understands him—his merits as an historian aside—as a modern researcher of the soul, something he himself was not aware of. For instance, as soon as you read the tellurian [= chthonic or earth centred] region as the unconscious and oppose it to the uranian region of consciousness, all of his findings—interpreted symbolically and not historically—gain a new and highly modern significance.”1 T HIS PRAISE of the Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose study Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (1861) can be seen as the foundational text of modern theories of matriarchy, was written by the German-born Jewish psychologist Erich Neumann (1905–1960). The passage originates from an unpublished manuscript on the Jakob-Esau brother motif and was written during Neumann’s first years in British Mandate Palestine, where he had migrated in 1934. After the Nazis had seized power in Germany, Neumann, a dedicated Zionist since his youth, left Berlin with his family in the autumn of 1933 to settle in Tel-Aviv for good. He briefly interrupted his journey, until May 1934, to study with Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich. These few months not only qualified the young man, who had just finished his study of medicine and held a university degree in psychology and philosophy, to practice as a psychotherapist, but also formed the beginning of a friendship and correspondence with the Swiss psychologist that lasted
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