Provisional Life

Provisional life names the existential posture of the puer-aeternus as marie-louise-von-franz diagnoses it: the refusal to land in the mundane commitments of earth, time, and body. The puer hovers, “never quite touches the earth. He never quite commits himself to any mundane situation but just hovers over the earth, touching it from time to time, alighting here and there, so that one has to follow such traces as there may be” (von Franz 1970, Puer Aeternus). The current position is always rehearsal for a more authentic life imagined to wait elsewhere; the relationship is not yet the relationship; the vocation is not yet the vocation. Everything real is postponed.

Von Franz traces provisional life to the mother complex and to the identification with the child archetype as such. The puer has not suffered the disillusioning limit that would land him. She cites Jung’s letter on the point: “I consider the puer aeternus attitude an unavoidable evil. Identity with the puer signifies a psychological puerility that could do nothing better than outgrow itself. It always leads to external blows of fate which show the need for another attitude. But reason accomplishes nothing, because the puer aeternus is always an agent of destiny” (von Franz 1970, citing Jung, Letters). The cure, on this reading, is not insight but impact — the external event that breaks the spell and forces the ego into time.

Her reading of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince is the canonical case. The poet-aviator who died in a wartime crash in 1944 displays, in her reading, every typical feature of the puer: biographical elusiveness, the paradise-of-childhood fixation, the fatal pull toward flight. Provisional life is the puer’s life as a whole.

Against provisional life stands simple adaptation — “doing one’s work, going to military service, trying to behave like everybody else… giving up the idea of being somebody special” (von Franz 1970, Problem of the Puer). Not individuation’s final word. But its first step.

Relationships

• puer-aeternus
• senex-saturn
• devouring-mother
• individuation

Primary sources

• problem-of-the-puer-aeternus (von Franz 1970)
• marie-louise-von-franz