How Is the Freedom of Modern Human Beings Threatened Simultaneously from “Within” and “Without”?
A Look at Erich Neumann’s Views and Ideas in The Origins and History of Consciousness
(Part Three)

With this introduction in mind, let us now look at Erich Neumann’s views in the final chapter of The Origins and History of Consciousness, entitled “Mass Man and the Phenomenon of Recollectivization.”

Neumann believes that the project of liberating modern human beings faces a serious challenge. In his view, our consciousness and awareness—in the sense of what we do deliberately and consciously throughout each day of our lives—are deteriorating. For this reason, we remain, perhaps more than ever before, under the “tyranny of the unconscious mind.”

He describes what is called individuality and individualism in the modern world as “particulate individualism,” or “atomistic individualism.” The reason for this expression is that atomic particles are homogeneous and alike: although each has an independent existence, that existence lacks any unique characteristic, and atoms therefore possess no independent identity in themselves. Each atomic particle is only one among billions of identical particles. Neumann believes that modern human beings have met with a similar fate.

Neumann argues that as human groups grow larger, the human mind inevitably tends towards becoming a mass and a herd, and two important things happen to us. First, our consciousness deteriorates and, under the control of the herd mind, we lose our individuality. Second, the ego—or what we call the “I”—instead of establishing our connection with the unconscious and our shadow, and linking the inner and outer worlds, comes in practice to serve entirely our persona, or “social mask.” It expends all its energy constructing and maintaining our mask within the herd. In this way our connection with the unconscious is severed, giving the unconscious the opportunity to bring us under its control and tyranny. This means that throughout the day we continually do things about which we have not consciously thought—actions wholly in the service of unconscious motives, which consist primarily of instinctual and emotional impulses.

Another consequence of this rupture between the conscious and the unconscious, and of the unconscious gaining ascendancy over consciousness, is a volcano of emotional and affective impulses within us that manifests as depression and anxiety. Today we know that, in the evolutionary structure of the human brain, there are three fundamental levels. The archicortex, or ancient brain, is shared by all vertebrates. It includes very simple yet fundamental functions of life, such as breathing, hunger and the autonomic system involved in digestion and reproduction, and is common from crocodiles and snakes to human beings. The second level is the paleocortex, or emotional brain, governed by the limbic system and found principally in mammals. This part of the brain, lying beneath the cortex, is responsible for the formation of emotions, memory and some forms of learning that gradually developed in higher vertebrates. Finally, at the highest level, we have the newest and most advanced part of the brain, the neocortex—or, for short, the cortex—which is responsible for higher processes of thought, many of which, such as speech, are found only in human beings.
One might regard the “unconscious” as another name for the “archicortex and paleocortex,” and “consciousness” as another name for the “neocortex.” The loss of cortical control over underlying structures can therefore be understood as a kind of “regression,” which diminishes human beings’ humanity and turns them into animals controlled by instincts and basic, uncomplicated emotions.

Neumann believes that as the reflective part of us and the thinking structures of the brain deteriorate, a more debased human being grows within us, which he calls the “Sub-Man” or “Mass Man.” In his view, what the project of human freedom sought, and what people fought for—the liberation of the human being from collective tyranny and the expansion of individuality—is forgotten in the process he calls recollectivization.