Puer Puella

The puella aeterna would be the 'eternal daughter' type of woman, one who is unconsciously identified with the anima of the father. Such a woman lives, as does the Jung man of the puer type, in an archetypal role.

Von Franz establishes the puella aeterna as the precise feminine counterpart to the puer aeternus, defining her structural identity through unconscious identification with the father's anima and thus inhabiting a Kore-goddess role divorced from personal selfhood.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis

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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.

Hillman articulates the puer's defining ontological orientation as vertical and timeless, constitutionally incapable of the horizontal, sequential patience that earthy or senex consciousness requires.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

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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.

Hillman identifies the puer's intimate relationship with death as a structural feature of its vertical, immortality-oriented consciousness rather than as mere recklessness or self-destruction.

Hillman, James, Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present, 1967thesis

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The third most differentiated function is personified by a child figure (son in a man, daughter in a woman), archetypally called a puer or puella.

Beebe formally locates the puer/puella within his eight-function typological model, assigning it specifically to the tertiary function-attitude as the eternal child of consciousness.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017thesis

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the deeply unconscious innocence of the puella aeterna — the eternal girl who expects good from the universe. We each need this aspect of ourselves, which gives us buoyancy in our lives. However, if we identify too much with this archetype and put the puella in charge of our lives, we might not be wary enough.

Signell presents the puella aeterna as both a necessary source of psychic buoyancy and a clinically dangerous identification that prevents the woman from assuming adult protective responsibility toward herself.

Signell, Karen A., Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991thesis

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the puer, in one of his aspects, is the divine intermediary. In this sense, he is connected with our astrological and mythic figure of Hermes-Mercury, who was the messenger between the Olympian world of the sky-father Zeus and the material world of incarnation.

Greene situates the puer as divine intermediary, connecting him mythically to Hermes-Mercury and defining his essential nature as the bearer of spirit between transcendent and incarnate realms.

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

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the puer's tendency to live a provisional life. This is quality of living in the future rather than in the present. That is understandable if we remember that the puer's world is the world of potential, which is always in the future.

Greene identifies provisional living — an existential orientation perpetually deferred toward future potential — as a hallmark characteristic of the puer's psychology, rendering all present commitments merely temporary.

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

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The puer himself has movement and vitality, but he is the spiritual dimension of a woman; and the woman herself, her femininity, is frozen and static when the puer dominates her. But I think the reason we have so many static princesses is that the energy of the puer, working on the spiritual plane, abstracts a woman from life.

Greene describes the intrapsychic effect of puer dominance in a woman, arguing that the archetype's spiritual energy abstracts the feminine from embodied life, producing the frozen, static princess figures of myth and fairy tale, alongside more active puella figures such as Atalanta.

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

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what I have found, and what the two horoscopes will usually show, is that both people generally have a puer-senex dilemma. What is unconscious in one becomes manifest behaviour in the other.

Greene demonstrates that the puer-senex polarity operates not only intrapsychically but interpersonally, with relationship partners typically splitting and projecting the two poles between them.

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

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there also seems to be a sort of unconscious death-wish embedded in these flirtations with death. Perhaps it is the longing for the mother whom he has rejected and left behind.

Greene reads the puer's compulsive courting of death — exemplified by figures such as James Dean and Jimi Hendrix — as simultaneously a triumph over mortality and an unconscious longing for return to the rejected mother.

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

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By his very nature, the puer cannot mature into sedate senility. Life never catches up with him. In the end he escapes it, just as he has managed to escape its responsibilities all along.

Greene interprets the mythic motif of the puer's early tragic death — Attis, Adonis, Icarus, Phaeton — as the logical culmination of a life structured around the refusal of ordinary temporal constraint.

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

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Without the earthy dimension of the father which is embodied in the figure of the senex, the puer cannot be truly creative, but degenerates into what von Franz suggests he is — a mother's boy.

Greene, following von Franz, argues that the puer unrelated to the senex principle cannot achieve genuine creativity and regresses into mother-bound infantilism, positioning the puer-senex relationship as the axis of psychological maturation.

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

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when the puer dominates in an individual's psychology, there is often a pattern of intense erotic fantasy which results in disappointment when the actual physical partner is obtained. In the end, it is not really sex that the puer pursues.

Greene distinguishes the puer's apparent eroticism — figured in the Don Juan pattern — as fundamentally a mystical longing for the absolute rather than genuine embodied desire, so that physical consummation inevitably disappoints.

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

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Here is the shadow of the idealistic puer aeternus: the trickster. The trickster employs the same function as the puer or puella, but with the opposite attitude.

Beebe articulates the typological shadow relationship between puer/puella and trickster, identifying the trickster as the dark twin that deploys the same function-attitude as the eternal child but with an inverted, destabilising intentionality.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting

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The senex is not shocked or repelled by the flaws and imperfections in life. He accepts these because it is the nature of reality... The puer is always in a hurry, and becomes bored when the inspiration gives way to prolonged labour or waiting.

Greene systematically contrasts the puer's impatience, perfectionism, and inability to tolerate imperfection with the senex's capacity for endurance, waiting, and acceptance, defining the two poles as complementary psychological necessities.

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

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The puer is the archetypal image of adolescence. It is natural to be dominated by him during our teens and early twenties. Like all archetypal images, the puer describes both a pattern of organic life and a psychological dynamic.

Greene normalises the puer as the appropriate archetype of developmental adolescence while insisting that his prolonged dominance beyond that phase represents a psychological problem distinct from the natural organismic process of ageing.

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

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puer aeternus, which is an archetype many Jung men and women (the feminine form is puella aeterna) fall into in late adolescence and early adulthood. See von Franz, 1970 and Hillman (Ed.), 1979

Beebe provides a concise bibliographic orientation to the puer aeternus/puella aeterna dyad, noting the Latin root in Ovid and pointing to the foundational texts of von Franz and Hillman as the primary scholarly references.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting

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I think the puer is very strong in Hillman, and so is the puer's problem with the senex; and he must justify it to someone, probably most of all to himself.

Greene critically observes that Hillman's theoretical celebration of the puer constitutes a form of self-justification, contrasting it with von Franz's more corrective, earth-oriented clinical reading.

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

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It must be weak on earth, because it is not at home on earth. Its direction is vertical. The beginnings of things are Einfiille; they fall in on one from above as gifts of the puer, or sprout up out of the ground as dactyls, as flowers.

Hillman identifies the puer's essential weakness on earth as an ontological rather than pathological condition, insisting that its gift is precisely the vertical influx of beginnings rather than the horizontal labour of completion.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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the transformation of the senex to the puer as well as in the integration of the whole problem... women who are identified with the anima role, though they come off as original and definite when the presence of the male projection is giving them a shape, when they are alone face to face with another woman, all this dissolves into a big sense of emptiness and uncertainty.

Von Franz traces the puella's structural fragility — dissolution into emptiness when deprived of the animating male projection — and situates the transformation of senex to puer within the crucial mediating role of the feminine.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting

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The puer is particularly at home in a horoscope without much earth, particularly if air or fire are strongly emphasised. It is almost as though this particular archetypal figure feels comfortable expressing through such a temperament.

Greene connects the puer archetype to astrological elemental configurations, arguing that the absence of earth and the predominance of air or fire constitutes the natural temperamental habitat for puer expression in the individual chart.

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

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I would like to single out two other clinical syndromes in addition to narcissistic disorder. These are psychosis and the puer aeternus.

Samuels classifies the puer aeternus alongside psychosis and narcissistic disorder as a primary post-Jungian clinical syndrome, situating it within the tradition of depth-psychological psychopathology.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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The puer ultimately needs to be about his father's business. He cannot make a true relationship with the feminine realm without a sense of manly potency, because otherwise the feminine always appears as the powerful and threatening mother.

Greene argues that the puer's reconciliation with the feminine is contingent upon prior engagement with the father principle, since without this potency the feminine is experienced solely as the overwhelming Great Mother rather than as genuine relatedness.

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

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puella, 91-93, 98, 131 puer aeternus: 27, 91-93 defined, 131

Woodman's index entries confirm that both puella and puer aeternus receive substantive treatment in her study of obesity, anorexia, and the repressed feminine, co-located with the perfectionist attitude and the negative mother complex.

Woodman, Marion, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980aside

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eternal child see puella aeterna/puer aeternus

Beebe's index cross-references puer aeternus and puella aeterna under the heading 'eternal child,' confirming his systematic identification of the archetype with the tertiary function in his eight-function typological model.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017aside

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