Puer Aeternus

The puer aeternus — the eternal youth — is the archetypal figure of the man who remains bound to the mother, who refuses the descent into committed adult life in time, and who lives instead in a mode of postponement, fantasy, and flight. The term is Ovid’s; the psychology is Jung’s; the extended scholarly treatment is marie-louise-von-franz‘s. Her The Problem of the Puer Aeternus reads Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Bruno Goetz as modern literary pueri and traces the complex through their work.

The puer stands in polar tension with the senex, the old king, the figure of established order and temporal commitment. The complex is not simply individual pathology; it is for von Franz a cultural symptom. She closes her seminar by citing Alexander Mitscherlich’s Society Without the Father and by invoking the “total inner man for whom the neurotic pueri aeterni of our days are unknowingly searching” (von Franz 1970). The question the puer asks — and cannot answer without the father — is how to enter time.

The core motifs the complex produces are flight (the airplane, the mountain, the retreat from earthbound life), the ideal mother (the unreachable woman, the blue flower), provisional existence (the life always about to begin), and the refusal of committed work. Redemption of the complex requires the descent into matter and into time — the coagula of the alchemical opus.

Relationships

• shadow
• mother-complex
• provisional-life
• senex

Primary sources

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