​Eranos was pivotal to Erich Neumann’s career, shaping both his theoretical development and his international standing. His introduction to the circle came in 1947, when Ernst Adler and C. G. Jung—who personally intervened with immigration authorities—enabled his travel to Switzerland. That summer in Ascona, Adler introduced him to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder and heart of the Eranos conferences. Deeply impressed, she consulted Jung and

invited Neumann to lecture the following year. From his debut with "Mystical Man" (1948), to his final talk, "The Psyche as the Place of Creation" (1960), Neumann became Eranos’s keynote speaker and, after Jung’s retirement, one of its most prominent figures. His lectures, marked by structural clarity, developmental insight, and metapsychological scope, elaborated and extended Jung’s work—sometimes moving beyond it. The Great Mother (1955) grew directly from Fröbe-Kapteyn’s commission to introduce the Eranos picture archive.

Both Jung and Fröbe-Kapteyn championed Neumann’s work. Jung defended him against detractors, calling Mystical Man“excellent” and, in the foreword to The Origins and History of Consciousness, declared his work a continuation of his own. Fröbe-Kapteyn regarded him as the natural successor to Freud and Jung; in an unpublished letter, she even proposed making the Eranos estate available to him for life so he could pursue “fields as yet unexplored by psychology.”

For Neumann, Eranos was more than a conference—it was, in his words, a “friendly island” where his thought matured, his influence widened, and his deep engagement with the Great Mother was lived as much as written.