The concordance 20 witnesses
Orientation
A wound that never closes is a way of staying near the gods. James Hillman reads the puer’s bleeding this way in “Senex & Puer”: the thin skin, the defenselessness against every pointed instrument, discloses not weakness but proximity to the divine, an archetypal structure rather than a symptom to be dressed and forgotten. His direction is vertical, Hillman insists elsewhere, in “A Blue Fire”: ideas fall in as gifts from above or sprout like dactyls from the ground, never arriving by the horizontal plod of ordinary time, and he grounds this mythologically in Kairos, Pothos, and Eros, each a face of puer consciousness. Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas, working from the consulting room and the chart, find underneath the puer’s erotic restlessness a mystical longing no embodied lover can satisfy. Donald Kalsched, treating trauma clinically, endorses Hillman’s core structural claim: archaic images arrive paired, not solitary, so the puer cannot be read apart from senex without falsifying it. To call the wound immaturity, on this reading, is to miss what it protects.
His bleeding reveals his archetypal structure in several ways. First, it is an image for vulnerability in general, the skin too thin for real life, the sensitivity to every pointed instrument of attack, the defenselessness of youngly naive and open truth.
Hillman reads the puer’s characteristic wound and bleeding as an archetypal disclosure of the principle’s essential vulnerability, openness, and proximity to the divine.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
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.
Hillman argues that the negative puer and the negative senex are structurally identical, collapsing the apparent opposition and revealing the archetype’s internally unified dynamics.
, Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present, 1967thesis
To be true to one’s puer nature means to admit one’s puer past — all its gambols and gestures and sun-struck aspirations. From this history we draw consequences. By standing for these consequences, we let history catch up with us and thus is our haste slowed.
Hillman describes how faithful adherence to puer nature, rather than its repudiation, allows the historical senex dimension to emerge organically, producing genuine psychological maturity.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
puer destruction stems from idealistic, naïve, overly optimistic political and social views blind to their shadows.
Hillman connects the shadow dimension of the puer archetype to collective cultural pathologies, arguing that cultural naivety and idealism without shadow-awareness are puer-driven phenomena.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
The puer therefore embodies a kind of magical longing. It is really a mystical longing, but it often expresses as a romantic craving for the One who will give life meaning.
Greene argues that the puer’s erotic restlessness and relational incapacity mask a fundamentally mystical drive that cannot be satisfied by any embodied object.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987thesis
Its direction is vertical. 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 dactyls, as flowers.
Hillman characterizes the puer’s orientation as fundamentally vertical — gift-bearing, initiatory, and at home in eternity rather than in horizontal space-time reality.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
The image of Kairos presents another of those astoundingly vivid personifications exemplifying an experience as a puer figure, like Pothos who presents the nostalgias of longing, and Eros who images the burning and moody complexities of love.
Hillman grounds the puer concept mythologically by identifying Kairos, Pothos, and Eros as archetypal puer figures, each personifying a specific mode of puer consciousness.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
most archaic images which come up from the unconscious psyche are not single images, like the Great Mother, but are structured in tandems, pairs, dyads, couplings, polarities, or syzygies, for example mother/child, victim/perpetrator, Puer/Senex.
Kalsched endorses Hillman’s structural argument that the Puer is properly understood only within its syzygy with Senex, not as an isolable static image.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
This is an image of spirituality carried out in the puer mode. Anyone can turn to religion or spiritual practice as a way out of the twists and turns of ordinary living.
Moore employs the Icarus myth to illustrate how the puer mode manifests in spiritual inflation and transcendence-seeking as a flight from embodied, labyrinthine life.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
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 mediates between Hillman and von Franz, affirming that the puer requires the senex’s earthing function to realize creativity and avoid maternal capture.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
it does strike me, from other things of Hillman’s that I have read, that there is a kind of ecstasising of the puer.
Greene critically notes a tendency in Hillman’s treatment to romanticize or idealize the puer, reflecting the archetype’s own seductive pull even on its theorists.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
we have missed the spiritual significance implied by Dionysus puer, and we have misappreciated the wine, the theatrical and its tragedy, the style of madness and phallicism, and other aspects of his nature and cult that bear on puer consciousness.
Hillman expands the puer’s mythological range by claiming Dionysus as a puer figure, arguing that the dismissal of Dionysus to the mother complex has impoverished understanding of puer consciousness.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
The eternality of the puer would see through all such opposites in terms of their fundamental likeness as a way of thought.
Hillman identifies the puer’s visionary mode as a capacity to perceive the fundamental unity underlying apparent opposites, distinguishing it from the mother complex’s materializing dualism.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
puer weakness provides the kind of hermetic, secret perception critical for adaptation to situations.
Hillman revalues puer vulnerability as a mode of perception — a hermetic, situational sensitivity that constitutes a genuine cognitive gift rather than mere weakness.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
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 maps the puer archetype onto elemental astrological typology, identifying fire and air temperaments as its natural medium and earth deficiency as its characteristic signature.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
the figure of the puer tends to constellate a curious reaction in many women, which I have already alluded to.
Greene analyzes the puer’s archetypal constellating power in relation to the maternal feminine, describing the ambivalent and highly charged response it evokes in mother-identified women.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
puer food behavior can show an asceticism, for instance, of a Pythagorean-Orphic sort. It can show a sensitivity in aesthetic flavors that belong (in the magical-astrological tradition of Picatrix) to Venus and not the Moon.
Hillman challenges the reflexive assignment of puer oral behaviors to the mother archetype, demonstrating how puer orality has its own distinct archetypal register linked to Venus and Saturn.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
betrayal is yet an advance over primal trust because it leads to the ‘death’ of the puer through the anima experience of suffering.
Hillman traces the puer’s psychological development through betrayal and suffering as necessary stages in the anima’s emergence and the puer’s transformation into mature fatherhood.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
I would like to single out two other clinical syndromes in addition to narcissistic disorder. These are psychosis and the puer aeternus.
Samuels surveys the post-Jungian clinical landscape, placing the puer aeternus alongside psychosis as a distinct syndrome meriting dedicated psychopathological attention.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside
in his writings on puer-senex we do locate something of a woven thread, at least
The editorial introduction to Hillman’s collected work identifies the puer-senex polarity as the closest thing to a systematic thread running through his otherwise deliberately unsystematic archetypal psychology.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside