Hold Fast

Forever Young

*The Puer.* Unlike the term senex, analytical psychology uses the concept of puer eternus widely and freely. It appears early in Jung's work (1912) [30] and has been elaborated in various aspects by him and by many since then. [31] We are especially indebted to Marie-Louise von Franz for her work on this figure and the problem. [32] The single archetype tends to merge in one: the Hero, the Divine Child, the figures of Eros, the King's Son, the Son of the Great Mother, the Psychopompos, Mercurius-Hermes, [33] Trickster, and the Messiah. In him, we see a mercurial range of these "personalities": narcissistic, inspired, effeminate, phallic, inquisitive, inventive, pensive, passive, fiery, and capricious. Furthermore, a description of the puer will be complicated because archetypal background and neurotic foreground, positive and negative, are not clearly distinguished. Let us nevertheless sketch some main lines of a psychological phenomenology.The concept puer eternus refers to that archetypal dominant, which personifies or is in special relation with transcendent spiritual powers. Puer figures can be regarded as avatars of the psyche's spiritual aspect, and puer impulses as messages from the spirit or as calls to the spirit. When the collective unconscious in an individual life is represented mainly by parental figures, then puer attitudes and impulses will show personal taints of the mother's boy or fils du papa, the perennial adolescence of the provisional life. Then the neurotic foreground obscures the archetypal background. One assumes that the negative and irksome adolescence, the lack of progress and reality, is all a puer problem, whereas it is the personal and parental in the neurotic foreground that is distorting the necessary connection to the spirit. Then the transcendent call is lived within the family complex, distorted into a transcendent function of the family problem, as an attempt to redeem the parents or be their Messiah. The true call does not come through, or is possible only through technical breakthroughs: drugs or death-defying adventure.The parental complex, however, is not solely responsible for the crippling, laming, or castration of the archetypal puer figures. This laming refers to the especial weakness and helplessness at the beginning of any enterprise. Inherent in the one-sided vertical direction is the Icarus-Ganymede propensity of flying and falling. [34] It must be weak on earth, because it is not at home on earth. The beginnings of things are Einfälle; they fall in on one from above as gifts of the puer, or sprout up out of the ground as daktyls, as flowers. But there is difficulty at the beginning; the child is in danger, easily gives up. The horizontal world, the space-time continuum, which we call "reality," is not its world. So the new dies easily because it is not born in the Diesseits, and this death confirms it in eternity. Death does not matter because the puer gives the feeling that it can come again another time, make another start. Mortality points to immortality; danger only heightens the unreality of "reality" and intensifies the vertical connection.Because of this vertical direct access to the spirit, this immediacy where vision of goal and goal itself are one, winged speed, haste - even the short cut - are imperative. The puer cannot do with indirection, with timing and patience. It knows little of the seasons and of waiting. And when it must rest or withdraw from the scene, then it seems to be stuck in a timeless state, innocent of the passing years, out of tune with time. Its wandering is as the spirit wanders, without attachment and not as an odyssey of experience. It wanders to spend or to capture, and to ignite, to try its luck, but not with the aim of going home. No wife waits; it has no son in Ithaca. Like the senex, it cannot hear, does not learn. The puer therefore understands little of what is gained by repetition and consistency, that is, by work, or of the moving back and forth, left and right, in and out, which makes for subtlety in proceeding step by step through the labyrinthine complexity of the horizontal world. These teachings but cripple its winged heels, for there, from below and behind, it is particularly vulnerable. It is anyway not meant to walk, but to fly.The direct connection to the spirit can be misdirected through or by the Great Mother. [35] Puer figures often have a special relationship with the Great Mother, who is in love with them as carriers of the spirit; incest with them inspires her - and them - to ecstatic excess and destruction. She feeds their fire with animal desire and fans their flame with promise of scope and conquest over the horizontal world, her world of matter. Whether as her hero-lover or heroslayer, the puer impulse is re-inforced by this entanglement with the Great Mother archetype, leading to those spiritual exaggerations we call neurotic. Primary among these exaggerations is the labile mood and the dependency of the spirit upon moods. Again, they are described in vertical language (heights and depths, glory and despair) and we hear echoes of the festivals for Attis called tristia and hilaria. [36]The eternal spirit is sufficient unto itself and contains all possibilities. As the senex is perfected through time, the puer is primordially perfect. Therefore there is no development; development means devolution, a loss and fall and restriction of possibilities. So for all its changeability the puer, like the senex, at core resists development. This self-perfection, this aura of knowing all and needing nothing, is the true background of the self-containment and isolation of any complex, reflected for instance in the ego's narcissistic attitudes, that angelic hermaphroditic quality where masculine and feminine are so perfectly joined that nothing else is needed. There is therefore no need for relationship or woman, unless it be some magical puella or some mother-figure who can admiringly reflect and not disturb this exclusive hermaphroditic unity of oneself with one's archetypal essence. The feeling of distance and coldness, of impermanence, of Don Juan's ithyphallic sexuality, of homosexuality, can all be seen as derivatives of this privileged archetypal connection with the spirit, which may burn with a blue and ideal fire, but in a human relationship it may show the icy penis and chilling seed of a satanic incubus.Because eternity is changeless, that which is governed only by the puer does not age. So, too, it has no maturing organic face that shows the bite of time. Its face is universal, given by the archetype, and so it cannot be faced, confronted in personal confrontation. It has a pose - phallic cavalier, pensive poet, messenger - but not a persona of adaptation. The revelations of the spirit have no personal locus in personality; they are eternally valid statements, good forever.Yet, in this faceless form it captures psyche. [37] It is to the puer that psyche succumbs, and just because it is psyche's opposite; the puer spirit is the least psychological, has the least soul. Its "sensitive soulfulness" is rather pseudopsychological, and a derivative of the hermaphroditic effeminacy. It can search and risk; it has insight, aesthetic intuition, spiritual ambition - all but not psychology, for psychology requires time, femininity of soul, and the entanglement of relationships. Instead of psychology, the puer attitude displays an aesthetic point of view: the world as beautiful images or as vast scenario. Life becomes literature, an adventure of intellect or science, or of religion or action, but always unreflected and unrelated and therefore unpsychological. It is the puer in a complex that "unrelates" it, that volatilizes it out of the vessel - that would act it out, call it off and away from the psychological - and thus is the principle that uncoagulates and disintegrates. What is unreflected tends to become compulsive, or greedy. The puer in any complex gives it drive and drivenness, makes it move too fast, want too much, go too far, not only because of the oral hunger and omnipotence fantasies of the childish, but archetypally because the world can never satisfy the demands of the spirit or match its ideal beauty. Hungering for eternal experience makes one a consumer of profane events. When the puer spirit falls into the public arena, it hurries history along.And finally, as Henry Corbin has often pointed out, the puer eternus figure is the vision of our own first nature, our primordial golden shadow, our affinity to beauty, our angelic essence as messenger of the divine, as divine message. [38] From the puer we are given our sense of destiny and mission, of having a message and being meant as eternal cup-bearer to the divine, that our sap and overflow, our enthusiastic wetness of soul, is in service to the gods, bringing eternal refreshment to the archetypal background of the universe.So the puer personifies that moist spark within any complex or attitude that is the original dynamic seed of spirit. It is the call of a thing to the perfection of itself, the call of a person to his or her daimon, to be true to itself. The puer offers direct connection with spirit. Break this vertical connection and it falls with broken wings. When it falls we lose the urgent burning purpose and instead commence the long processional march through the halls of power towards the heart-hardened sick old king who is often cloaked and indistinguishable from the sick wise old man or woman.The spark extinguished by this "heroic overcoming" leaves behind sad regrets, bitterness and cynicism, the very emotions of the negative senex. By conquering the parental complexes in the neurotic foreground, we smother the archetypal background. The puer suffers an enantiodromia into senex; he switches Janus faces. Thus are we led to realize that there is no basic difference between the negative puer and negative senex, except for their difference in biological age. The critical time in this process that is represented by the midpoint of biological life is as well the midpoint of any attitude or psychological function that ages but does not change. The eros and idealism of the beginning succumb to success and power, to be refound, as we have seen from our examination of the senex, only at the end when power and success fail, when Saturn is in exile from the world - then eros as loyalty and friendship, and idealism as prophetic insight and contemplation of truth return.In all this, the greatest damage is done to meaning, distorted from idealism into cynicism. As the spirit becomes meaning through senex order, so the puer is meaning's other face. As archetypal structure, the puer is the inspiration of meaning and brings meaning as vision wherever he appears. A beginning is always meaningful and filled with the excitement of eros. Meaning expresses the invisible coincidence of the positive puer with the positive senex. The puer aspect of meaning is in the search, as the dynamus of the child's eternal "why?"; the quest, or questioning, seeking, adventuring, which grips personality from behind and compels it forward. All things are uncertain, provisional, subject to question, thereby opening the way and leading the soul toward further questioning.However, if persuaded into the temporal world by the negative senex, the puer loses connection with its own aspect of meaning and becomes the negative puer. Then it goes dead, and there is passivity, withdrawal, even physical death. These pueri are only flower people like Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Crocus, whose tears are but wind-flowers, anemones of the goddess, and whose blood gives only Adonis roses and Attis violets of regret. They are flower-people who are unable to carry their own meaning through to the end, and as flowers they must fade before fruit and seed. Eternal Becoming never realized in Being; possibility and promise only. Or the negative puer may become hyperactive and we find all the traits accentuated and materialized, but without inherent meaning. When the falcon cannot hear the falconer, wingedness becomes mere haste and fanaticism, an unguided missile. A person is caught in the puer activities of social rebellion, intellectual technology, or physical adventure with redoubled energy and loss of goal. Everything new is worshipped because it gives promise of the original, while the historical is discarded because it is of the senex who is now enemy. Personal revelation is preferred to objective knowledge so that minor epiphanies weigh more than the classics of culture. Eventually meaning declines into a philosophy of the absurd, action into the acte gratuite or violence, or intoxication, or flight into the future; and the chaos returns, which the puer as archetype is itself called to oppose. By refusing history, by pushing it all down into the unconscious in order to fly above it, one is forced to repeat history unconsciously. In the unconscious the senex position builds up with a compulsive vengeance until with all the force of historical necessity it takes over in its turn, reducing new truths to old cliches again, switching the only-puer into an only-senex, split from the next generation.The puer gives us connection to the spirit and is always concerned with the eternal aspect of ourselves and the world. However, when this concern becomes only puer, exclusive and negative, the world is itself in danger of dissolution into the otherworldly. This danger is especially present in the psyche and history of this fraction of our era. [39] Therefore it is of immense importance that the puer be recognized and valued, for it carries our future - positive or negative - not necessarily as the next step in time, but as the futurity within every complex, its prospective meaning, its way out and way forward, as a possibility of renewal through eros and as a call to meaning built on the eternities of spirit. Therefore it is of immense importance that we attempt the healing of the archetypal split, which divides puer from senex, turning them into a negative antithesis, hardening the heart against one's own puer imagination, thereby demonizing one's angel so that the new, which comes into being through the puer, is demonic. When the archetype is split, the dynamus works independently of the patterns of order. Then we have a too-familiar pattern: action that does not know and knowledge that does not act, fanatic versus cynic, commonly formulated as youth and age. This negative turn happens not only in young people or in the first half of life or in new movements.We must therefore deny again the usual separation into first and second halves of life, as presented for example by Jacobi, Fordham, and Dunn. [40] It dangerously divides puer and senex. Always the puer is described from within the senex-puer duality and therefore comes out negatively, which also implies a positive senex view of itself.Let us look at the usual recommendations for the "first half" of life, or "how to cure a puer": analyze the unconscious, reduce the fantasies, dry the hysterics, confront the intuitions, bring down to earth and reality, turn the poetry into prose. The will is to direct sexuality into relationship; the crippling is to be overcome through the exercise of work; practicality, sacrifice, limits, hardening. The face is to be set, positions defended, the provisional overcome through the panacea of commitment. Concentration, responsibility, roots, historical continuity and identity: in a word, ego-strengthening. Note well: all these images are Saturnian.Commitment as duty clips the wings and binds the feet, as Saturn is chained through his commitments. Ego-strengthening fosters a revolutionary unattached shadow that would smash all fetters, for the strong ego has the strong shadow, the brilliance makes its own blackness. This path of worldly commitment aims to sever the puer from its own vertical axis; it reflects a senex personality, which has not itself separated the parental from the archetypal and is thus threatened by its own child, its own phallus, and its own poetry.However we conceive the tasks of youth, or of the beginning of things, they cannot be accomplished without the meaning given by the spiritual connection. Initiation into reality is not to take away the initiant's relation with the primordial origins but only to separate these origins from the confusions of the personal and parental. Initiation is not a demythologizing into "hard" reality, but an affirmation of the mythical meaning within all reality. Initiation "softens" reality by filling in its background with layers of mythological perspective, providing the fantasy, which makes the "hardness" of reality meaningful and tolerable, and at the same time truly indestructible. The puer figure - Baldur, Tammuz, Jesus, Krishna - brings myth into reality, presents in himself the reality of myth that transcends history. His message is mythical, stating that he, the myth - so easily wounded, easily slain, yet always reborn - is the seminal substructure of all enterprise. Traditional initiation of the puer by the positive senex confirms this relation to the archetype. Some substitutes for initiation - and analysis can be one - may instead sever this relation.Relation with any archetype involves the danger of possession, usually marked by inflation. This is particularly true of the puer because of its high-flights and mythical behavior. Of course, possession through the senex brings an equally dangerous set of moods and actions: depression, pessimism, and hardness of heart. Even a minimum of psychological awareness - that I am just what I am as I am - can spare complete archetypal possession. This awareness is made possible through the reflective, echoing function of the psyche. This function is the human psyche's contribution to spirit and to meaning, which noble as they may be can also be, without psyche, runaway destructive possessions. So the main puer problem is not lack of worldly reality but lack of psychic reality. Rather than commitment to the order of the world the puer needs to be wedded to psyche, to which the puer is anyway naturally drawn. Rather than historical continuity and roots in the horizontal, he needs devotion to the anima. First psyche, then world; or through the psyche to the world. The anima has the thread and knows the step-by-step dance that can lead through the labyrinth, and can teach the puer the subtleties of left hand/right hand, opening and closing, accustoming and refining vision to the half light of ambivalence.Let us not mistakenly take this as Lebensphilosophie or a psychological prescription for "cure" - i.e., only involvement with a real woman leads a man out of his mother-bound adolescent compulsions. We are discussing rather an archetypal structure, not "how to be." Each "hot idea," at whatever time of life in whomever, wherever, requires psychization. It needs first to be contained within the relationship to psyche, given the soul connection. Each complex needs realization and connection within the psyche, taming the puer's hot compulsions with the common salt of the soul. This salt makes things last and brings out their true flavor. The young and burning sulphur needs union with the elusive quicksilver of psychic reality before it becomes fixed and weighty.This turning to the soul means taking in our complexes out of the world, out of the realm of senex power and system. Only this can slow the speed of history and technology and the acceleration of particle-men into bits of information without souls. It means that the search and questing be a psychological search and questing, a psychological adventure. It means that the messianic and revolutionary impulse connect first with the soul and be concerned first with its redemption. This alone makes human the puer's message, at the same time reddening the soul into life. [41] It is in this realm of the soul that the gifts of the puer are first needed.

"Senex and Puer" by James Hillman: