Don Juan

The puer as Don Juan is certainly erotic, in the sense that he is always in pursuit of relationship, and women love him. Yet he is also incapable of relationship, because if ever he fully commits himself to the experience of the body, then he is trapped in the world of form, and the quest for immortality is lost.

Greene argues that Don Juan is the puer aeternus in erotic disguise: his serial seductions are driven not by desire for the body but by an unconscious quest for transcendence that physical consummation would foreclose.

Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987thesis

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In the psychopathic personality, whose characteristic, as I have worked out, is to have no images, the image of all images—death, is missing. The second is the ‘estatuas parlantes,’ the animation of the statue. In psychotherapy, when a statue appears in a dream it is an indication of what is dead or petrified in us.

López-Pedraza reads Don Juan’s psychopathic contempt for death and his confrontation with the animated statue of Don Gonzalo as the defining crisis of a personality that has lost access to the image of death and thus to psychic depth.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis

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Don Juan Tenorio belongs to the imagery of the Spanish religious tradition: Tirso de Molina, the first who wrote about Don Juan, became a priest, and the play was written to be performed on All Souls Day.

López-Pedraza situates Don Juan’s sacred transgression—raping a novice—within the specifically Catholic imaginal world of All Souls Day, linking it to the Hermetic archetype of the nymph-chaser and to the religious roots of the myth.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis

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Implicit in our discussion of rape and horror in relation to the mythological image of Hermes chasing a nymph and the damnation of Don Juan is an attempt to attain some differentiation in a great bulk of material which is usually

López-Pedraza uses Don Juan’s damnation alongside the Hermes-nymph image to differentiate symbols from images and to demarcate the boundary between the emotional soul-image and psychopathic imagelessness.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977supporting

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Take, for example, a Don Juan who is all involved in a ‘meaningful relationship’ with a young lady named Dulcinea. Juan is a very passionate fellow and intensely jealous.

Easwaran invokes Don Juan as a popular exemplar of the physically conditioned, jealously passionate man whose suffering cannot be resolved at the level where it arises.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975aside

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