Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume One
The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume One: Revelation and Apocalypse is the first volume, fully annotated, of a major, previously unpublished, two-part work by Erich Neumann (1905–1960). It was written between 1934 and 1940, after Neumann, then a young philosopher and physician and freshly trained as a disciple of Jung, fled Berlin to settle in Tel Aviv. He finished the second volume of this work at the end of World War II. Although he never published either volume, he kept them the rest of his life.
The challenge of Jewish survival frames Neumann’s work existentially. This survival, he insists, must be psychological and spiritual as much as physical. In Volume One, Revelation and Apocalypse, he argues that modern Jews must relearn what ancient Jews once understood but lost during the Babylonian Exile: that is, the individual capacity to meet the sacred directly, to receive revelation, and to prophesy. Neumann interprets scriptural and intertestamental (apocalyptic) literature through the lens of Jung’s teaching, and his reliance on the work of Jung is supplemented with references to Buber, Rosenzweig, and Auerbach. Including a foreword by Nancy Swift Furlotti and editorial introduction by Ann Conrad Lammers, readers of this volume can hold for the first time the unpublished work of Neumann, with useful annotations and insights throughout.
These volumes anticipate Neumann’s later works, including Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, The Origins and History of Consciousness, and The Great Mother. His signature contribution to analytical psychology, the concept of the ego–Self axis, arises indirectly in Volume One, folded into Neumann’s theme of the tension between earth and YHWH. This unique work will appeal to Jungian analysts and psychotherapists in training and in practice, historians of psychology, Jewish scholars, biblical historians, teachers of comparative religion, as well as academics and students.
Erich Neumann (1905–1960) was a student of C. G. Jung, a philosopher, psychologist, and writer. Born in Germany, he moved to Israel in 1934, where he became a practicing analytical psychologist. His previously published works, including Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, have never been out of print.
Ann Conrad Lammers, Ph.D., received her Master of Divinity from The General Theological Seminary in New York and her doctorate in theology and psychology from Yale University. A Jungian psychotherapist and marriage and family therapist, she retired from practice in 2015 to edit The Roots of Jewish Consciousness.