The Origins and History of Consciousness is an important and wide-ranging interpretation of the relations between psychology and mythology. Erich Neumann undertakes to show that the individual consciousness passes through the same archetypal stages of development that marked the history of human consciousness as a whole. He draws upon the full range of world myth in the illustration of his thesis, and his account makes unexpectedly fresh and lively reading in a field not always notable for these qualities. Neumann ends the work with a trenchant commentary on contemporary society.