Hillman's charge here is precise and cuts in more than one direction. Analytical psychology did something well-intentioned and quietly devastating: it explained the puer — the spirit-figure, the eternally youthful, the inspiration-bearing — by routing it back through the mother. Fly too close to the sun, and you are told you were never really headed for the sun; you were fleeing the breast. The soaring becomes a symptom, the ideal becomes a defense, the eros becomes an unresolved wound. Once that interpretive move is made, spirit cannot land anywhere without being reduced to its maternal occasion.

What Hillman is protecting is the senex-puer axis itself — the idea that spirit has its own autonomous polarity, its own father-son dialectic of limit and aspiration, and that this polarity is genuinely constitutive of psychic life rather than derivative of an earlier maternal attachment. Strip that axis and you don't cure the neurosis; you produce one. The very act of interpretation becomes the pathologizing force. Spirit isn't made trustworthy by being grounded in the mother — it is made suspect, dependent, permanently in recovery from a wound it was told is its real origin. The causality runs backward: we diagnosed the complex by creating it.