{"id":592,"date":"2016-06-27T20:03:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T03:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/?p=592"},"modified":"2025-05-07T18:07:52","modified_gmt":"2025-05-08T01:07:52","slug":"the-c-g-jung-erich-neumann-connection-an-interview-with-dr-lance-owens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/the-c-g-jung-erich-neumann-connection-an-interview-with-dr-lance-owens\/","title":{"rendered":"The C.G. Jung\u2014Erich Neumann Connection: An Interview with Dr. Lance Owens"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Dr. Lance Owens has dedicated the past thirty or more years of his life to studying C.G. Jung, whose willingness to engage with and understand his visionary experiences has transformed so many lives.<\/p>

Owens has also recently become profoundly interested in the life and work of Erich Neumann, who was arguably one of Jung\u2019s most gifted students, and who eventually became a close friend of Jung\u2019s.<\/p>

Through the influence of Jung, Neumann made his own creative and compelling contributions to the field of depth psychology through works such as\u00a0The Great Mother<\/em>\u00a0(1955),\u00a0The Origins and History of Consciousness<\/em>\u00a0(1954), and\u00a0Depth Psychology and a New Ethic<\/em>\u00a0(1949) among others.<\/p>

Lance Owens\u2019 interest in Neumann was amplified by the publication of letters between Jung and Neumann in 2015, correspondence that revealed the tremendous respect Jung had for his friend and for the Neumann\u2019s capacity to grasp many of the depth concepts that were so critical to Jung for his own reasons.<\/p>

In fact, Owens\u2019 himself has also uncovered such a deep regard for Neumann that in a recent email to me, he wrote quite poignantly, \u201cNeumann has become one of those \u2018dead friends of the soul\u2019 that come to help and haunt us, with their questions, and their answers, and the facts of their own lives. I do now believe that hearing Neumann\u2019s voice, across the decades, is a crucial event in understanding the development of Jung\u2019s movement, and of Jung\u2019s own experience.\u201d<\/p>

During our recent conversation, Lance explained how Neumann, having grown up in an integrated German family in Berlin, realized in his twenties that there was no place for him in German culture. Rather, he embraced his Jewish roots in spite of not being a practicing Jew. When Hitler took power in 1933, Neumann left Germany for Israel, stopping over in Zurich for six months in order to spend time in analysis with Jung.<\/p>

As Lance views it, this was part of an initiatory phase for Neumann. He was, perhaps, looking for\u00a0tzadik[i]<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, a spiritual guide, when he went for analysis with Jung.<\/p>

During Neumann\u2019s quest for his Jewish roots, he had been intrigued by Martin Buber\u2019s writings on Hasidism[ii]<\/a>, which was centered around renewal and spiritual energy. Hasidism, a movement that emerged in the eighteenth century, was led by a mystical rabbi, Israel ben Eliezer (also called Baal Shem Tov), widely considered to be the founder of Hasidism.[iii]<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>

Neumann believed that ben Eliezer and his successor, the Mezritcher Maggid, had found a transparency between the outer and the deeper realities, enabling them to see\u00a0through<\/em>, to perceive the Divine in the world.<\/p>

Neumann seemed to find in Jung the\u00a0tsaddik\u00a0<\/em>he was searching for, a unique leader who also had the ability to see through the world to the depth in a similar way.<\/p>

In accordance, Lance Owens informs me, Neumann, after those six months of analysis with Jung, affirmed for the remainder of his life that it was\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0transformative event of his life and he could not imagine what his life might have been without that experience.<\/p>

Once Neumann arrived in Israel, he established depth psychology there. While today\u2019s training to become a Jungian analyst can be quite intensive and drawn out, Owens points out, Jung had one primary for someone to become a Jungian analyst: the analyst-in-training must know the psyche was real. Neumann most certainly got that, Owens insists.<\/p>

Upon his arrival in Israel in 1934, Jungian psychology was still new to Neumann, but he did his best to establish his practice based on what he knew. Though he returned more than once to visit Jung in subsequent years, by 1939 when World War II began in earnest, correspondence between Jung and Neumann was completely cut off until 1945 after the war was over.<\/p>

During that time in Israel, Neumann was seeing patients, sometimes up to 50 hours a week, many of them victims of the Holocaust with very little money, but a great deal of trauma that needed to be addressed. Neumann\u2019s patients were dealing with issues of the Jewish\u00a0spirit<\/em>, Lance affirms.<\/p>

Neumann was very isolated during the period of time he was on his own in Israel. In fact, as Owens notes, the Jung-Neumann letters are subtitled, \u201cAnalytic Psychology in Exile,\u201d and Neumann was very much in exile.<\/p>

While most of Jung\u2019s followers had the benefit of remaining with him throughout the war years, Neumann, having no other choice, took what he learned from Jung and applied it, imagined into it, and expanded it in ways that occurred to him as he went along.<\/p>

When Neumann was finally able to return to Zurich in 1946, he had written massive amounts of content, including the beginning\u00a0of Depth Psychology and a New Ethic<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Origins and History of Consciousness<\/em>, among others. Neumann took the entr\u00e9e that Jung had given him, to accept that the psyche was real, and he talked and wrote about it.<\/p>

When Neumann and Jung reconnected after World War II ended, Jung was deeply appreciative of the extent of Neumann\u2019s creative application of depth psychology, Owens relates.<\/p>

Neumann\u2019s book,\u00a0Depth Psychology and a New Ethic<\/em>, focused on encountering the shadow in ourselves that we see in the \u201cother,\u201d and Jung praised it highly. When Neumann sent Jung a copy of\u00a0Origins and History of Consciousness<\/em>, Jung deemed it \u201cbrilliant.\u201d As Owens shared with me, he is aware of the work of no other whom Jung praised as directly as he did that of Erich Neumann.<\/p>

Jung\u2019s own lifelong work began to manifest in his writings in the\u00a0Liber Novus<\/em>, also known as\u00a0The Red Book<\/em>, beginning in 1913 and continuing through World War I until 1918 or 1919.<\/p>

The work revealed that Jung felt the Christian age was coming to an end, an idea Lance Owens investigates in his own paper entitled, \u201cJung and Aion.\u201d[iv]<\/a>\u00a0Jung saw that there was a two-thousand-year transformation taking place in human consciousness, Owens asserts.<\/p>

New God images were forming. Jung felt we needed to come into a new relationship with the \u201cdepths,\u201d with the psychic realm. There were things \u201cbubbling up\u2014in us, through us, in our cultures\u201d \u2014as Owens puts it.<\/p>

Jung fully engaged those questions throughout his life, even though he was not necessarily quick to communicate them.<\/p>

For a long while he said he did not think he could share the \u201csecret knowledge\u201d he had acquired, though some of that changed in 1944, when Jung had a series of visions after he had a heart attack resulting in a near-death experience.<\/p>

Owens notes that both Jung and Neumann felt that humanity was on the edge of a great transformation. Jung felt a deep connection to his tradition, his \u201cdead,\u201d his Christian history, Owens insists, and at the same time, Neumann approached things from his tradition as a Jew.<\/p>

However, they both came to many of the same conclusions, and both focused on two core issues: the question of evil, and the forgotten or repressed feminine.<\/p>

The visions that ultimately became\u00a0The Red Book\u00a0<\/em>(which many Jungians still have not studied, Owens notes wryly), contributed to Jung\u2019s recognition that the subject of \u201cevil\u201d\u2014the dark one, the shadow, the mercurial figure, the \u201cother\u201d\u2014was tremendously forgotten in Christian theology.<\/p>

In Judaism, this shows up in the concept of the\u00a0yetzer hara<\/em>[v]<\/a>\u2014defined as \u201cthe inclination to evil,\u201d Owens suggests. Jung understood that the understanding of evil had to be incorporated in our coming conscious understanding of what it means to be human.<\/p>

The second issue Jung wrestled with was the forgotten feminine\u2014the \u201cin-dwelling imminence of a transcendence in this world\u201d\u2014the idea of\u00a0guides<\/em>, Lance believes.<\/p>

Neumann, too, had encountered the forgotten or repressed feminine in Judaism in the face of patriarchy. He pulled from Jewish psychology the image of the Shekinah[vi]<\/a>, the divine feminine or the feminine element of the transcendent which dwells in the world, but which has been exiled.<\/p>

Jung\u2019s idea of the coming consciousness involved not only a recognition of evil and of the feminine, but also of a\u00a0coniunctio<\/em>\u00a0in consciousness, a union of inner and outer, of \u201csense and nonsense,\u201d between bright and dark, and between masculine and feminine elements.<\/p>

Jung began to really write about them after his illness in 1944, in\u00a0Aion<\/em>,\u00a0An Answer to Job<\/em>, and\u00a0Mysterium Coniunctionis<\/em>, and it was during this period that Jung truly found he could talk to Neumann about the issues most critical to him.<\/p>

While it is possible Neumann saw parts of\u00a0The Red Book<\/em>\u00a0and had probably even discussed some of Jung\u2019s experiences and findings, Neumann had come to many of the same conclusions through working his own process and through his own perspective which was, in many ways, parallel to those of Jung.<\/p>

We each come to those universal truths in our own way, Lance insists. Finding what\u2019s authentically ours involves us each going in to our history, our psychic history and our heritage.<\/p>

This heritage can come in dreams or visions, without any cognitive planning of the process. Neumann came to his own myth authentically through his own tradition in mystical aspects of Judaism, allowing him to engage and dialogue very profoundly with Jung\u2019s own psychology in so many ways.<\/p>

Listen to the full interview with Lance Owens<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong> here<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>(Approx. 35 mins.)<\/p>

Notes<\/strong><\/p>

[i]<\/a>\u00a0A tzadik (also spelled zadik or sadiq) refers to a spiritual master: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tzadik<\/p>

[ii]<\/a>\u00a0See Martin Buber\u2019s works such as\u00a0The Tales of Rabbi Nachman<\/em>,\u00a0The Legend of the Baal-Shem<\/em>, and\u00a0Tales of the Hasidim<\/em><\/p>

[iii]<\/a>\u00a0Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism, was also known as the Besht, or Baal Shem Tov, a Jewish mystical rabbi:\u00a0https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Baal_Shem_Tov<\/a><\/p>

[iv]<\/a>\u00a0\u201cJung and Aion: Time, Vision, and a Wayfaring Man\u201d by Lance S. Owens is available to read at http:\/\/www.gnosis.org\/Jung-and-Aion.pdf<\/p>

[v]<\/a>\u00a0Yetzer hara,\u00a0https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yetzer_hara<\/a><\/p>

[vi]<\/a>\u00a0Learn more about the Shekinah the Jewish Virtual library at http:\/\/www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org\/jsource\/Judaism\/Shekhinah.html<\/p>

Lance S. Owens<\/strong>\u00a0is an historian and a physician in clinical practice. He has served on the clinical staff of the University of Utah for over two decades.\u00a0 Since publication of Jung’s\u00a0Red Book: Liber Novus\u00a0<\/em>in 2009, Dr. Owens has published several studies focused on Jung’s extraordinary visionary experience. His lectures and seminars on Jung and the Red Book (available online) have been enjoyed by many thousands of listeners. Dr. Owens is also the founder and editor of \u201cThe Gnosis Archive\u201d, the major Internet repository of ancient Gnostic texts, including the complete Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic Scriptures. A catalog of his publications and audio lectures is available at:\u00a0www.gnosis.org\/Lance-Owens<\/a><\/p>

Listen to the full interview with Lance Owens here<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>(Approx. 35 mins.).<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Lance Owens has dedicated the past thirty or more years of his life to studying C.G. Jung, whose willingness to engage with and understand his visionary experiences has transformed so many lives. Owens has also recently become profoundly interested in the life and work of Erich Neumann, who was arguably one of Jung\u2019s most gifted students, and who eventually became a close friend of Jung\u2019s. Through the influence of Jung, Neumann made his own creative and compelling contributions to the field of depth psychology through works such as\u00a0The Great Mother\u00a0(1955),\u00a0The Origins and History of Consciousness\u00a0(1954), and\u00a0Depth Psychology and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carljung","category-depthpsychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1275,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/1275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.depthinsights.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}