The Origins and History of Consciousness is a Jungian study of the development of human consciousness by the German-Israeli psychologist Erich Neumann, a student of C. G. Jung, first published in German in 1949 as Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins. Neumann maps the emergence of the ego out of an undifferentiated 'uroboric' unconscious through a sequence of archetypal stages — the Great Mother, the separation of the World Parents, the Hero's struggle, the rescue of the captive, and the centroversion of the integrated self. Jung wrote the foreword and treated the book as a major theoretical contribution to analytical psychology.
The book draws on world mythology to argue that the stages of individual psychological development recapitulate those of collective human consciousness. Moving from primal non-differentiation — symbolized by the uroboros, the tail-eating serpent — through the hero's victory over the dragon to the integration of the self, Neumann holds that mythological symbols encode genuine stages of psychic growth. R. F. C. Hull's English translation was first published by Princeton University Press in 1954 as Bollingen Series XLII and has remained in continuous print since.
Contents
Part One: The Mythological Stages in the Evolution of Consciousness
A. The Creation Myth — I. The Uroboros
A. The Creation Myth — II. The Great Mother
A. The Creation Myth — III. The Separation of the World Parents: The Principle of Opposites
B. The Hero Myth — I. The Birth of the Hero
B. The Hero Myth — II. The Slaying of the Mother
B. The Hero Myth — III. The Slaying of the Father
C. The Transformation Myth — I. The Captive and the Treasure
C. The Transformation Myth — II. Transformation, or Osiris
Part Two: The Psychological Stages in the Development of Personality
Reception
Together with Neumann's later The Great Mother, the book is the most-cited theoretical work in post-Jungian developmental psychology and the source of the now-standard 'hero's journey' archetype which Joseph Campbell drew on for The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Later critics — including James Hillman, who broke from the Neumann/Jung lineage to found archetypal psychology — have argued that the stage model is overly teleological, treats male hero-development as universal, and reproduces the patriarchal narrative arc it claims to merely describe. Princeton/Bollingen has kept the R. F. C. Hull translation in continuous print since 1954; the work remains foundational reading in Jungian training institutes and a frequent reference in transpersonal psychology.
Frequently asked
What is The Origins and History of Consciousness about?
It is an analytical-psychology study of how the ego emerges from an undifferentiated unconscious state, traced through the symbolism of world mythology. Neumann charts a sequence of archetypal stages — from the uroboros and the Great Mother through the Hero's conflict with the dragon to the integration of the self — arguing that individual psychological development recapitulates broader stages in the history of human consciousness.
What is the uroboros in Neumann's model?
The uroboros — the ancient image of a serpent eating its own tail — represents for Neumann the original state of consciousness before ego differentiation: a condition of psychic wholeness indistinguishable from unconsciousness. The developmental sequence begins and ends with this symbol: the human ego emerges out of it through separation and conflict, and the mature self is described as a sublimated uroboros in which conscious and unconscious are integrated rather than dissolved.
How has the book been received by scholars?
It has been foundational in Jungian training institutes and in transpersonal psychology, and is frequently cited as a theoretical source for the hero's journey archetype that Joseph Campbell popularized. Major critics — James Hillman, Walter Kaufmann, Anthony Stevens — have challenged its teleological stage model, its masculine bias in treating the Hero's path as universal, and its biological recapitulationist assumptions. Jung, who wrote the foreword, endorsed it as a direct continuation of his own work on archetypes and individuation.