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The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
270

We must not regard our modern, waking consciousness as the obvious point of departure and then, on the analogy of hypnosis, take the participation mystique of the group psyche to be a limitation of this waking state.  The reverse is true; the conscious state is the late and uncommon phenomenon, and its complete attainment is far more of a rarity than modern man so flatteringly pretends, while the unconscious state is the original, basic, psychic situation that is everywhere the rule.


16

Even today we can see from primitives that the law of gravity, the inertia of the psyche, the desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait.  Yet even this is a false formulation, since it starts from consciousness as though that were the natural and self-evident thing.  But fixation in unconsciousness, the downward drag of its specific gravity, cannot be called a desire to remain unconscious; on the contrary, that is the natural thing.  There is, as a counteracting force, the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this direction.  One has no need to desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most conquer the original situation in which man drowses in the world, drowses in the unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea.  The ascent toward consciousness is the 'unnatural' thing in nature; it is specific of the species Man, who on that account has justly styled himself Homo sapiens.  The struggle between the specifically human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man's conscious development.