Puer
Aeternus is the name of a god of antiquity.
The words themselves come from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and are there
applied to the child-god in the
Eleusinian mysteries. Ovid
speaks of the child-god
Iacchus, addressing him as
puer aeternus
and
praising him in his role in these mysteries. In later
times, the child-god was identified with
Dionysus and the god
Eros.
He is the divine youth who is born in the night in this typical
mother-cult mystery of
In
general, the man who is identified with the
archetype of the
puer aeternus
remains too long in adolescent psychology;
that is, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or
eighteen are continued into later life, coupled in most cases with too great a
dependence on the mother. The two typical disturbances of a
man who has an outstanding
mother complex are, as Jung points out, homosexuality and Don Juanism.
In the case of the former, the heterosexual libido is still tied up with
the mother, who is really the only beloved object, with the result that sex
cannot be experienced with another woman. That would make her
a rival of the mother, and therefore sexual
needs are satisfied only with a member of the same sex.
Generally such men lack masculinity and seek that in the partner.
In
Don Juanism there is another typical form of this same disturbance.
In this case, the image of the mother – the image of the perfect woman
who will give everything to a man and who is without any shortcomings – is
sought in every woman. He is looking for a mother goddess, so
that each time he is fascinated by a woman he has later to discover that she is
an ordinary human being. Once he has been intimate with her
the whole fascination vanishes and he turns away disappointed, only to
project
the image anew onto one woman after another. He eternally
longs for the maternal woman who will enfold him in her arms and satisfy his
every need. This is often accompanied by the romantic
attitude of the adolescent. Generally great difficulty is
experienced in adaptation to the social situation and, in some cases, there is a
kind of false individualism, namely that, being something special, one has no
need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on.
In addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to both
an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority.
Such people also usually have great difficulty in
finding the right kind of job, for whatever they find is
never quite right or quite what they wanted.
There is always “a hair in the soup.”
The woman also is never quite the right woman;
she is nice as a girlfriend, but - . There is always a “but” which
prevents marriage or any kind of definite commitment.
This
all leads to a form of
neurosis which H.G. Baynes has described as the “provisional life,” that is,
the strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life.
For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman
or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the
fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.
If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to
commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a
smaller or greater extent, a saviour complex, or a
Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to
save the world; the last word in philosophy, or
religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found.
This can go on so far as to be a typical pathological
megalomania, or there may be minor traces of
it in the idea that one’s time “has not yet come.”
The one thing dreaded throughout by
such a type of man is to be bound to anything
whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of
entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that
one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a
situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again.
Every just-so situation is hell. At the same time, there is a
highly symbolic fascination for dangerous sports – particularly flying and
mountaineering – so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get
away from reality, from the earth, from ordinary life. If
this type of complex is very pronounced, many such men die young in airplane
crashes and mountaineering accidents. TPoPA – 8
In
general, the positive quality of such youths is a certain kind of spirituality
which comes from a relatively close contact with the unconscious.
Many have the charm of youth and the stirring
quality of a drink of champagne.
Pueri aeterni
are generally very agreeable to talk to. They usually have
interesting things to talk about and have an invigorating effect upon one.
They do not like conventional situations; they
ask deep questions and go straight for the truth. Usually they are
searching for genuine religion, a search that is typical of people in their late
teens. Generally the
youthful charm of the puer aeternus is prolonged through
later stages of life, but there is another type of
puer who
does not display the charm of eternal youth, nor does the archetype of the
diving youth shine through him. On the contrary, he lives in a continual
sleepy daze, and that too is a typical
adolescent characteristic: the sleepy, undisciplined,
long-legged youth who merely hangs around, his mind wandering indiscriminately,
so that sometimes one feels inclined to pour a bucket of cold water over his
head. The sleepy daze is only an outer aspect, however, and if you can
penetrate it, you will find that a lively fantasy
life is being cherished within. TPoPA – 9
In
Symbols of Transformation Jung spoke of
one cure – work – and having said that he hesitated for a minute and
thought, “Is it really as simple as all that? Is that just the one cure?
Can I put it that way?” But work is the
one disagreeable word which no puer
aeternus likes to hear, and Jung
came to the conclusion that it was the right answer. My experience also
has been that if a man pulls out of this kind of youthful
neurosis, then it is
through work.
There
are, however, some misunderstandings in this connection, for the
puer aeternus can work, as can
all primitives or people with a weak ego complex, when fascinated or in a state
of great enthusiasm. Then he can work twenty-four hours at a
stretch or even longer, until he breaks down, but
what he cannot do is to work on a dreary, rainy morning when work is boring and
one has to kick oneself into it; that is the one thing the
puer aeternus
usually cannot manage and will use any kind of excuse to avoid.
And analysis of a puer aeternus
sooner or later always comes up against this problem, and it is only when the
ego
has become sufficiently strengthened that the problem can be overcome and there
is the possibility of sticking to the work.
As
far as I have seen, the
unconscious generally tries to produce a compromise, namely, to indicate the
direction in which there might be some enthusiasm or where the psychological
energy would flow
naturally, for it is of course easier to train oneself to work in a direction
supported by one’s
instinct.
That is not quite so hard as working completely uphill in opposition to
your own flow of
energy.
Therefore it is usually advisable to wait a while and find out where the
natural flow of interest and energy lies and then try to get the man to work
there. But in every field of work there
always come the time when routine must be faced.
All work, even creative, contains a certain amount of boring routine, and that
is where the
puer aeternus
escapes and comes to the conclusion that “this is not it!”
In such moments, if one is supported by the
unconscious, there
are generally
dreams which
show that one should push on through the obstacle and if that succeeds then the
battle is won. TPoPA – 11
Puer – negative process of individuation
In
actuality, for instance, he gets up at 10:30 a.m., hangs around till lunch time
with a cigarette in his mouth, giving way to his emotions and fantasies.
In the afternoon he means to do some work but first goes out with friends
and then with a girl, and the evening is spent in long discussion about the
meaning of life. He then goes to bed at one, and the next day
is a repetition of the one before, and in that way the capacity for life and the
inner riches are wasted. They cannot get into something
meaningful but slowly overgrow the real personality so that the individual walks
about in a cloud of fantasies, fantasies which in themselves are interesting and
full of rich possibilities, full of unlived life. You feel
that such a person has a tremendous wealth and capacity but there is no
possibility of finding a means of realization, and then the tree – the inner
wealth – becomes negative, and in the end kills the personality.
That is why the tree is frequently linked up with the negative mother
symbol, for the mother complex has that danger. Because of it
the process of individuation can become negative. TPoPA 60
…
because one of the objections which the puer aeternus always brings up
when you want to encourage him to fell the tree is that he does not want such a
narrowing of the horizon. What would be left if he had to
give up his wishful fantasies, his masturbating, and such stuff?
He would be just a petty little bourgeois who goes to his office, and so
on. He could not stand such narrowing! But
it is not true! If one has the courage to cut down this wrong
kind of inner greatness, it comes again, but in a better form – the horizon and
life are widened and not narrowed. I think this myth should
always be told when the hero has to cut the tree, because that is always what he
does not want to realize, or believe. If he only knew how
much wider life would be if the could give up that wrong kind of inner life,
then he might perhaps do it. TPoPA – 61
In
my first lecture I spoke of the problem of the neurosis of the provisional life,
namely, that people live in the expectation of being able
one day (not
yet, but one day) which is very often linked up with the savior complex.
Rene Malamud has given me a copy of a paper by
Erich
Fromm in which he speaks of this problem in detail. I am
only taking an extract. He says:
If one believes in Time then one has no possibility of sudden change, there is a constant expectation that “in time” everything will come all right. If one is not capable of solving conflict one expects that “in time” the conflicts will solve themselves, without one having to risk a decision. You find that very often, especially in believing in time as far as one’s own achievements are concerned. People comfort themselves, not only because they do not really do something but also for not making any preparation for what they have to do, because for such things there are plenty of time and therefore there is no need to hurry. Such a mechanism is illustrated by the case of a very gifted writer who wanted to write a book which he though would be the most important book in world literature, but he did not do more than have a few ideas as to what he would write and enjoy in fantasy what the effect of his book would be and tell his friends that he had not nearly finished it. In reality he had not even written a single line, not a single word; though, according to him, he had already worked for seven years on it. The older such people get, the more they cling to the illusion that one day they will do it. In certain people the reaching of a certain age, generally at the beginning of the forties, brings a sobering effect so that they then begin to use their own forces, or there is a neurotic breakdown which is based upon the fact that one cannot live if one does not have that comforting time illusion.
(i.e. letting things/people go) is a very dangerous and typical experience. It belongs to the neurosis of the puer aeternus who generally, because he is so close to the unconscious, has overwhelming experiences of it which convey to him a positive feeling of life. But then he cannot let them go. He just sits there, waiting and hoping for the experience to come back, and the more one sits and waits the less it can approach consciousness again because it is the essence of these experiences that they always come in a new form. The experience of the Self does not repeat itself, but generally turns up again at those desperate moments when one does not look for it any more. It has turned completely in another direction and suddenly again stands before you in a different form. Because it is life and the renewal of life itself and the flow of life, it cannot repeat itself. That would be a contradiction of its very essence. Therefore, if ever one has an experience of the Self, the only way afterward not to get poisoned and on the wrong track is to leave it alone, turn away – turn to the next duty and even try to forget about it. The more the ego clings to it and wants it back, the more one chases it away with one’s own ego desire. It is the same, for instance, with positive love or feeling experiences. People who make childish demands on other people every time they have a positive love experience, or feeling experience, with another human being, always want to perpetuate it, to force it to happen in the same way again. They say, “Let’s take the same boat trip because of the magical Sunday when it was so beautiful.” You can be quite sure that it will be the most awful failure. You may try it, just to show that it does not work. It never works. It always shows that the ego has not been able to take the experience of the Self in an adult way, but that something like childish greed has woken up. The positive experience has called up this childish attitude – that this is the treasure that should be kept! If you have that reaction, you chase it away forever and it will never come back. The more you long for and the more you seek, the more you get into a cramped state of conscious desire, the more hopeless it is. TPoPA 111
Constant
awareness of the transitoriness of life, and a sense of
always preparing for an end before you get there, is typical of the
puer aeternus.
For instance, when he makes friends with a girl he knows that the end
will be a disappointment and a parting, so he does not give himself
wholeheartedly to the experience. Instead, he is always
getting ready to say good-bye.
As
far as reason is concerned, he is right, but then he does not live; reason has
too much say in his life. He does not allow for the
unreasonable human side which does not always prepare for the retreat because
there will be a disappointment. That shows a lack of
generosity. Why can one not say, “Of course there will be
disappointment because all experiences in life are transient and may end in
disappointment, but let’s not anticipate it. Let us give
ourselves with full love to the situation as long as it is there.”
The one does not exclude the other. One need not be
the fool who believes in nothing but happiness and then falls from the clouds,
but if one always retreats at the beginning in anticipation of the suffering,
that is a typical pathological reaction. It
is
something many neurotic people do. They try to
train themselves not to suffer by always anticipating suffering.
One person said, “I always think ahead of the
suffering to come and
like that I am trained against it. I try to anticipate it in
fantasy all the time.” But that is typically morbid and
completely prevents you from living. A double attitude is
required: that of knowing how things are likely to turn out, and that of giving
oneself completely to the experience all the same. Otherwise
there is no life. Reason organizes it ahead of time so that
one may be protected against suffering - in order that one
shall not get the full experience, naively – just when one does not expect it.
In that case, reason and consciousness have taken too much away
from life – exactly what the
puer aeternus
tries to do all the time. He does not want to give himself to
life and tries to block it off by organizing it with his reason.
That is precisely the morbid disease.
Remark: When you think of the pictures of van Gogh, even the most melancholy are full of energy and force and emotion.
Yes,
even desolation is fully experienced and even what is lost is fully expressed,
in contrast to this. One thinks sometimes how much more alive
such people would be if they
suffered!
If they can’t be happy let them at least be unhappy, really unhappy for
once, and then they would become human. But the
puer
aeternus cannot even be quite unhappy! He has not even
the generosity and the courage to expose himself to a situation which could make
him unhappy. Already, like a
coward, he builds bridges by which to escape – he anticipates the disappointment
in order not to suffer the blow, and that is a refusal to live.
That
is how he sees adult life, for he has not found a bridge by which he could take
over what we would call the true life into adult life. That
is his great problem, I think, in a nutshell; namely, how can one pull out of
this fantasy life of youth and youthfulness without losing its value?
How can one grow up without losing the feeling of
totality and the
feeling of creativeness and of being really alive, which one had in youth?
TPoPA 19
My
experience is that it does not matter, if you analyze a man of this type,
whether you force him to take the outer of the inner
world seriously; that is really unimportant, though perhaps it depends on the
type.
The important thing is that he should stick
something out. If it is analysis, then
analyze seriously, take the dreams seriously, live according to them, or, if
not, then take a job and really live the outer life. The important thing
is to do something thoroughly,
whatever it is.
But the great danger, or the neurotic problem, is that the
puer aeternus, or the man caught in this problem,
tends to (…) just put it in a box and shut the lid on it in a gesture of sudden
impatience. That is why people tell you suddenly that they
have another plan, that this is not what they were looking for.
And they always do it at the moment where things become difficult.
It is the everlasting switching which is the dangerous thing, not what
they do.
The
puer aeternus
is, in a way, the opposite of a tree, because he is a creature who flies and
roams about. He always refuses to be in the present and to fight in the
here-and-now for his life, which is why he
avoids attempting to relate to a woman. Woman represents the tie to the
earth for a man, particularly if she wants to have children, and a family would
tie him forever to the earth. For the
bird that flies about, the puer,
the woman is the tree
principle. In accepting this side of life, he accepts the
just-so situation of life, which he tries constantly to avoid.
The tree shows clearly that being tied inevitably means losing one’s
freedom to roam about. The puer aeternus and the tree
symbol belong together. The tree fixates him, fastens him to
earth, either in a coffin or in life.
One
of the problems is that if the puer enter life, then he must face the
fact of his mortality and the corruptible world. He must accept
the fact of his own death. That is a variation of the old
mythological motif where after leaving Paradise, which is a kind of archetypal
womb, man falls into the realization of his incompleteness, corruptibility, and
mortality. TPoPA 160
When
you are identical with the puer aeternus archetype, then
the shadow has
to be faced in order to come down to earth. But when you are
identified with the shadow, the
archetype of the
puer has to be faced
again in order to connect with it, for facing the other side is what leads to
the next step. TPoPA 159
If
someone writes off his relationships so quickly, you may be sure that he will
write himself off equally quickly. That is the suicidal type
of person. TPoPA 197
This (example) shows the problem of the
puer aeternus
in a nutshell. He is
too high up, and that was his attitude.
He always wanted
the cream of every experience. He was
the Don Juan type and had been with any number of girls with whom he usually
lived for about a fortnight or three weeks before walking out on them. As
soon as things became a bit too personal and too binding or committing, he just
walked off. He did not know, or had not realized, that this was an
unsatisfactory way of behaving.
He thought everybody behaved like that, that that was the way for a man to live.
He was, in a way, completely innocent about this. TPoPA 124
(…) is how
the shadow, in practical life, hits the
puer
aeternus: he either crashes to his death in an airplane (flying himself), or
dies in a mountain accident, or in a car crash, or he lands in prison –
half-innocently in many cases. TAoPA 128
Puer Mother Complex as Prison v. Reality
(Regarding a particular person’s
dream analysis where the
focus is in a prison) … So the prison is the negative symbol of the mother
complex ( in which he sits all the time anyhow), or it would be prospectively
just exactly what he needs, for he needs to be put into prison, into the prison
of reality. But if he runs away from the prison of reality,
he is in the prison of his
mother complex, so it is prison anyway, wherever he
turns. He has only the choice of two prisons, either that of
his neurosis or that of his reality: thus he is caught between the devil and the
deep blue sea. That is his fate, and that is the fate of the
puer aeternus altogether. It is up to him which prison
he prefers: that of his mother complex and his
neurosis, or of being caught in
the just-so story of earthly reality. TAoPA 134
I
remember (Jung) saying once to a puer aeternus
type, “It does not matter what job you take.
The point is that for once you do something thoroughly and conscientiously,
whatever it is.” This man insisted that
if only he could find the right thing, then he would
work, but that he could not find it.
Jung’s answer was, “Never mind, just take the
next bit of earth you can find. Plow it and plant something in it.
No matter whether it is business, or teaching, or anything else, give yourself
for once to that field which is ahead of you.”
TPoPA 153
Everybody
has a field of reality to work in if he wants to. The
childish trick of saying, “I would work if it were the right thing,” is one of
the many self-delusions of the puer aeternus
by which he stays within the mother realm and his megalomanic identification
with the gods – who as you know do not work. TPoPA 153
Except
for Hephaestus, who was despised by all the other, there are no working gods in
Greek mythology. Fields would also imply limitation.
That is the drawback of getting in touch with reality, because in that
way one becomes limited, there are restrictions. One comes to
the miserable human situation where ones hands are tied and it is not possible
to do as one would like, something particularly disagreeable to the
puer
aeternus. In your work you come up against your own
limitations, both intellectual and physical, for what one produces is always
miserable compared with the fantasies one had lying in bed about what one would
do, if one could! The fantasy is far more beautiful than the
real product! TPoPA 153
PA – Archetype / instinct realm (the spectrum)
Usually,
the puer aeternus is too caught up in the realm of archetypal
representation. Through his
mother complex
he is generally possessed by it, which means that he underestimates living
experiences, the infrared realm.
It is
quite a different thing if I think about a steak or if I eat it: the thought of
the steak and sauce béarnaise
can be delightful, but if you eat it you
will have still other experiences. The same is true for
the archetype of the
coniunctio. It is certainly one thing to fantasize about
a love affair and try to imagine every detail of the experience, but the actual
living experience is different. TPoPA 145
The
puer generally tends to avoid the immediate friction of
realization. He does not go into the heavens below, which he
underestimates, and along with that the instinctual realization of life.
(…) This is a generalization, however, and the
puer
does sometimes live a certain amount of instinctual life, but he blocks off the
psychological realization, so to speak. He lives his experience
automatically, as a split-off shadow affair. In that form his archetypal
fascination with the idea of the great love and the
coniunctio
remains a wishful fantasy – one day he will meet the woman who will bring
perfect love, perfect warmth, perfect harmony, a lasting relationship, and so on
– clearly a mother-image illusion.
In
the meantime he does not abstain from sexual contacts, for that would frustrate
him too much, so he has twenty or thirty affairs with women, … but he does not
let himself be affected by them. He does not live the thing
through. You could say of such people that they are as
innocent, in the wrong kind of way, as though they had not lived at all, because
they live it without being in it. They make a mental
reservation, saying to themselves that this isn’t
it, but that meantime they need a woman.
Then they have the physical union, but it does not count mentally or in
the inner aspect of fantasy, in the feeling of the man himself.
If it is not taken seriously, if one does not let the impact of the
experience touch the
psyche, then it is as though it had not been lived.
I
once analyzed a prostitute who was exactly like an old maid.
Her dreams always showed untouched little girls or women who had never had any
sexual experience. This was completely true!
She shut herself off from what she lived. She just
wanted the money, she was no in it – for she admitted to herself neither
the pleasure of certain contacts nor her disgust over others.
She made a rational decision that she needed the dollars and said to hell with
the rest of it. Thus she was, in a way, untouched by life.
Though she had rather severe psychic symptoms, she was not miserable.
One of the results of the analysis was that she suddenly realized her own
miserable condition, which she had not seen before. It was
all carried on by intellectual decision, and she never admitted that certain men
disgusted her and other attracted her, for that would have disturbed business.
Therefore, though was really a very emotional woman, she did not allow
herself to have the emotional experience of what was happening, for if she had
done so she would have earned less money by refusing certain men.
The
same thing happens sometimes with the puer aeternus.
Although he lives the instinctual side, he does so in a cut-off way.
He makes an artificial emotional barrier, separating what he is living
from his real self. In such a case the stars below are not
realized, so the dream says to take them and enjoy them. Life is
incomplete if you live it in its fantasy aspect; it has to be lived through on
the instinctual level. But that means really accepting it, letting
yourself be hit by the experience and not limiting it by living it in a
conditional way. The have a mental reservation about it means that
it is not lived at all, and that is why the
puer aeternus is sometimes
cut off from the stars below, and why the solution for the dreamer is that
he should sink into that world. TPoPA 147
Remark: So often it happens that people such as this man you mention, who are regarded as pueri aeterni by their associates, are very much envied as being able, instead of cutting themselves off from life, of throwing themselves into life with great vigor so that they appear to be living successful lives. We could say that was the shadow and say that we know they are really cut off. But how do they achieve this appearance of so vigorous a life?
They
can act! Many people are actors, and to act something simply
means to play a part. Those people, as far as I have come to
know them, play a part even to themselves, so as to convince themselves that
they are living. Then they land in analysis and have to
confess that this is not the case and that they are not happy.
Others may consider them successful, but they themselves do not feel so.
The criterion is simple: Do you feel that you are living? Those who do not
feel alive describe it as being as though they were acting, even for themselves.
TPoPA 147
Remark: Or wearing costumes!
Yes,
and people fall for that, unless they know some psychology and look at the eyes
to see the real expression. Then one can tell that something
is wrong, even though such people seem to be so successful.
Remark: If one were fixed at the ultraviolet end and had numerous experiences at the other end, then I suppose the ultraviolet end would be too beautiful for the infrared end. Even though there might be nineteen experiences, they would be sordid and miserable because one would always be looking for the ultraviolet?
Yes,
exactly. That is a good way to put it. You
can say that if you live one end in a split-off way, then one end cannot
communicate with the other. Put quite simply, you have the
experience but it is not meaningful, and an experience which one does not
feel meaningful is nothing. It only becomes real when
it is connected with an emotional perception of meaning.
Without that one is just bored. TPoPA 148
If
the puer goes too much (one way or the other), that would not be so bad.
But in reality the puer does something much worse: he risks
neither way completely but ventures a little both ways, so as to be on the safe
side. He bets on the one horse but puts a little on the other too, and
that is his self-destructive act. That is worse than going too much either
way, for that gets punished and one has to wake up and pull out.
The
natural interplay of psychological opposites corrects the one-sided business.
Life forces one into the middle path. But in order to
avoid suffering the puer
plays a dirty trick which boomerangs back onto him. He splits
himself by throwing a sop to the dragon, but remains on the other side inwardly.
He has illusions about himself, and so he arrests the process of life and
gets stuck, for even the interplay of the opposites is thwarted.
That is what his weak personality tricks him into in order that he may
escape suffering. TPoPA 151
Puer Aeternus - Reality = Death
If you venture into life, into reality, instead of keeping
outside so as to avoid
suffering, you will find that the earth and women are like a fertile field
on which you can work and that life is also death; that if you give yourself to
reality, you will be disillusioned and the end of it will be that you will meet
death. If you accept your life, you really, in the deepest
sense of the word, accept death. If you accept your life, you
really, in the deepest sense of the word, accept death, and that is what the
puer does not want. He does not want to accept mortality,
and that is why he does not want to go into reality, because the end of it is
the realization of his weakness and of his mortality. He
identifies with the immortal and does not accept the mortal twin, but
by going into life he would assimilate the mortal
brother. TPoPA 156
Puer Aeternus - The Big Realization
After the
puer loses the ecstatic, romantic
élan
of youth, there is a danger of an
enantiodromia into
a completely cynical attitude toward women, life, work in general, and money.
Many men suddenly fall into an attitude of disappointed cynicism.
They lose all their ideals and romantic impulses and also, naturally,
their creativeness, writing it all off as the fantasies of youth.
They then become petty, earth-bound, small-minded people who just want to
have a family, money, and a career. Everything else is
regarded as romantic nonsense – what one wanted and did when one was young, must
now be written off. It is as though Icarus had fallen into
the mud and life had stopped. This is due to a weak
consciousness, which cannot conceive of the possibility of enduring
the difficulties of reality and not sacrificing one’s ideals
but instead testing them on the touchstone of reality. Such
men take the easy way and say that ideals merely complicate life and must
therefore be written off. This is a great danger.
TPoPA 159
One
of the problems is that if the puer enter life, then he must face the
fact of his mortality and the corruptible world. He must accept
the fact of his own death. That is a variation of the old
mythological motif where after leaving Paradise, which is a kind of archetypal
womb, man falls into the realization of his incompleteness, corruptibility, and
mortality. TPoPA 160
When this kind of Icarus loses his wings and falls into the
stagnating aspect of the mother and matter, some very independent men cannot
make up their minds to marry because they feel that marriage would be a prison,
a thought which is typical of the
mother complex
and the puer aeternus mentality. After having married,
as Jung once said of such a man, “He curled up in his little basket like a nice
little dog and never moved again.” They never move again;
they don’t dare look at other women, and they generally marry (even though she
may be beautifully disguised in youth) a devouring-mother type of woman.
If she is not already that, they force her into the role by being
submissive and boylike and sonlike. Then the marriage
situation is changed into a kind of warm, lazy prison of habits which they put
up with with a sigh.
Such men continue on the professional side quite effieciently and generally become very ambitious, for everything is boring at home – there is the basket for the dog, the sexual problem is parked, as is the food problem. All ambition and power go over into the career where they are quite efficient, while on the eros side they stagnate completely; nothing goes on there any more, for the marriage is the final trap in which they got caught.
That is another way in which the puer aeternus can fall into stagnating water – either on the mental side, when he gives up his creativeness, or on the eros side, when he gives up any kind of differentiated feeling relationship and curls up in the habitual conventional situation. TPoPA 160
The
strange thing is that it is mainly the pueri aeterni who are the
torturers and establish tyrannical and murderous police systems.
So the puer and the police-state have a secret
connection with each other; the one constellates the other.
Nazism and
Communism have been created by men of this type. The real
tyrant and the real organizer of torture and of suppression of the individual
are therefore revealed as originating in the not-worked-out-mother
complex of such men. That is what possesses them, and it
is out of the state of possession into which such a
complex plunges people that they act in this outrageous manner.
TPoPA 164
I
remember a medical doctor telling me that at the beginning of the last war, when
he was a stomach specialist and very well known, it happened that he had a
patient with stomach ulcers who was a high Nazi official. He
succeeded in curing this man, and as a result he was spoken of in Nazi circles
as being a good stomach doctor. So throughout the war an
enormous number of high-up Nazi officials came to him for private treatment, and
under the religio medici (the medical code) he of course could not refuse
to accept them as patients. He said it was amazing to see
those concentration-camp torturers, those so-called heroes, take off the
beautiful uniform and shirt and disclose a body tanned by sun and sport – and
then to find nervous, hysterical stomach trouble underneath.
These pseudo-heroes were merely weaklings – spoiled Mamma’s boys.
A large percentage he had to dismiss, telling them the trouble was purely
psychological, sheer hysteria. To the doctor it was an
eye-opener – not what he had expected, although to us it makes sense.
If he told them of a cure or a regimen which was the least bit
disagreeable, they would not try it. Moreover, if he poked
into their troubles, many of them would begin to cry. He said
that, when the beautiful hero-persona had fallen off, he felt as if he were
confronted with an hysterical woman. If you look at the faces
of the “heroes” who are again drawing the swastika everywhere, you see this same
type. TPoPA 165
Puer Aeternus Pseudo-Philosophical Intellectualism
Some
pueri aeterni escape from the mother by means of actual airplanes; they
fly away from mother-earth and from reality. Many others do
the same thing in “thought airplanes” – going off into the air with some kind of
philosophical theory or intellectual system. I have not given
much thought to it, but it has struck me that especially among Latins the
mother complex
is combined with a strange kind of strong but sterile intellectualism, a
tendency to discuss heaven and earth and God-knows-what in a kind of sharp
intellectual way and with complete uncreativeness. It is
probably a last attempt on the part of the men to save their masculinity.
That simply means that certain young men who are overpowered by their
mothers escape into the realm of the intellect because there the mother,
especially if she is the earth type and a stupid animus kind of woman, is not up
to it. They can slip out from under her skirts into the realm
of the intellect, where she cannot follow. Therefore, since
it is an initial attempt to escape the mother’s power and the animus pressure by
getting into the realm of books and philosophical discussion, which they can
think mother does not understand, it is not altogether destructive.
Such a man has then a little world of his own – he discusses things with
other men and can have the agreeable feeling that it is something which women do
not understand. In this way he gets away from the feminine,
but he loses and leaves his earthly masculinity in the mother’s grip.
He saves his mental masculinity but sacrifices his phallus – his earthly
masculinity and creativity. The vitality of action, that
masculinity which molds the clay, which seizes and molds reality, he leaves
behind, for that is too difficult; he escapes into the realm of philosophy.
Such people prefer philosophy, pedagogy, metaphysics and theology, and it
is a completely unvital bloodless business. There is no real
question behind such philosophy. Such people have no genuine
questions. For them it is a kind of play with words and
concepts and is entirely lacking in any convincing quality.
One could not convince a butterfly with such “philosophical” stuff.
Nobody would listen to it.
The
pseudo-philosophical intellectualism is ambiguous because, as I said before, it
is a way by which to make a partial escape from the dominant grip of the mother
figure, but is done only with the intellect, and only the intellect is saved.
That is really what one sees in the tragedy of the
Oedipus myth, where
Oedipus commits the mistake of entering into the question instead of saying to
the Sphinx that she has no right to put such questions and that he will knock
her down if she asks such a thing again. Instead, he gives a
very good intellectual answer. The play continues very
cleverly with the sphinx apparently committing suicide.
Oedipus pats himself on
the back and steps right into the middle of his
mother complex,
into destruction and tragedy, just because he complimented himself on having got
out of that difficulty by answering the question! TPoPA 169
The wolf in Germanic mythology belongs also to Wotan and one of his names is Isengrim, which really means “iron head.” But is has also been interpreted in folklore as “grim, cold rage,” and you can say that the wolf very often stands for a kind of cold, hidden resentment. Most people who have had a very unhappy childhood have something like this at the bottom of their souls. It never comes up. It is something absolutely frozen and cold, a form of petrified rage, and that is also behind the demand for more and more: “The others owe me everything.” If one has to deal with orphans or children who have grown up in a “home” and have been beaten a lot, one can generally see the wolf very clearly. TPoPA 241
PA - Why differentiate the anima?
…
because that is what women always do: they give genuine love and add a little
power-trap. That is exactly what the feminine problem is for
the man: that usually there is in women a mixture of genuine love and devotion
and then a little left-hand power-trick to put him in a box.
His mistake is that he simply casts away the whole thing, and that is just what
the puer aeternus man often does. Because there is
always a little power-trick in the woman’s love, he takes that as an excuse to
reject the whole thing: all women are rotten – their love is nothing but putting
one under the slipper, nothing but putting one into a box.
Cheap sweeping statements such as these save the man the difficulty of
asking every minute of the day, “Is this a trick or is it love?”
Such statements show that the man is not up to that problem with women.
If he is not conscious of his anima and his own eros, he will always fall
for tricks. For instance, he wants to go out, and his wife
thinks that he might meet Mrs. So-and-so, in whom he is interested, so she
pretends to have a headache and says, “Let’s stay at home, I have a headache.”
But if he has a differentiated feeling function he will sense that today
this is a trick, and he therefore will say that he is going out and that
if she has a headache she can stay at home. The next
evening she has a real headache, and it is very unrelated is he says, “No, to
hell with you, I am going out!” Only if a man has a
differentiated eros-development can he find out whether a woman is playing a
trick or whether it is the real thing, and that is exactly what men do not like
to do; they like sweeping generalizations: “I never go in for that,” or “I
always such-and-such.”
If
a man takes a feeling-problem seriously, he has, from minute to minute, to
relate to what the woman does and, on top of that, he has always to be aware of
whether it is power or real feeling, which in an unconscious woman are very
close to each other. If you are an analyst, the problem is
the same: an analysand may bring you a tremendous amount of feeling, but, as
Virgil says, there is always a snake in the grass, which means that you are
never quite sure what she is up to, but if you reject the whole transference on
account of that, they you destroy the patient’s feeling. And
you are not a good analyst. If you cannot accept the real
feeling in a transference, you are destructive to the analysand.
On the other hand, if you fall for the transference and eat it up, then
she will nicely put you in her pocket and make a fool of you.
So
whenever a man is confronted with the problem of relating to woman, he has to
perceive the difference between snake-in-the-grass tricks and genuine love, and
he cannot discover that difference without possessing differentiated feeling.
If he has that, he will just smell a rat and know from the woman’s voice
that she is up to something, or from her eyes and her voice he will learn that
it is feeling to which he must respond. But a man can learn
that only by differentiating his anima for a long time, by dealing with her and
with the problems of relationship. If he makes a principle of
yes or no, then he is not capable of relating to women or of being an analyst.
TPoPA 236
(Melchoir) sees through such tricks, but he does not see that Sophie also loves him; he doesn’t realize that for a woman the one does not exclude the other. For her the two go together – she can love a man and yet play such tricks – and it is the man’s task to discover from minute to minute which is which. TPoPA 237
… if a solution is described as taking place after death, it
means that the conscious
means for realization have not yet been found in this reality.
That is why in
Christianity victory over evil and the
union of the opposites
is
projected into the time after the
Day of
Judgment.
This is also the ominous background of our present-day problem, in connection with which I would like to quote a saying of Rabelais to which Jung drew my attention: La verité dans sa matière brute est plus fausse que la faux (Truth in its prima materia, in its first appearance, is falser than falseness itself.) And that is very true of what we have just experienced. But in spite of it all, these are attempts to bring forth a new creative religious attitude and also a renewal of cultural creativity – which can only manifest in a psychological and individual form. The trouble is that it comes up with such a disgustingly false political twist that it is more false than falseness itself. In spite of this, however, we must turn toward it and discriminate the seeds in it. Otherwise, we are stuck, forever, building light, “rosy-colored” buildings upon burnt-out ruins. TPoPA 274