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. The critical time in this process that is represented by the midpoint of biological life is as well the midpoint of any attitude or psychological function that ages but does not change. The eros and idealism of the beginning succumb to success and power, to be re-found, as we have seen from our examination of the senex, only at the end when power and success fail, when Saturn is in exile from the world - then eros as loyalty and friendship, and idealism as prophetic insight and contemplation of truth return. In all this, the greatest damage is done to meaning, distorted from idealism into cynicism. As the spirit becomes meaning through senex order, so the puer is meaning's other face. As archetypal structure, the puer is the inspiration of meaning and brings meaning as vision wherever he appears. A beginning is always meaningful and filled with the excitement of eros. Meaning expresses the invisible coincidence of the positive puer with the positive senex.
— James Hillman
Hillman is tracking a specific collapse here — not the transition from youth to age but the failure of something that ages without transforming. The negative puer does not become the positive senex; it flips into the negative senex, the rigid, the bitter, the merely powerful. What was once vision becomes ideology, and what was eros becomes control. That inversion is enantiodromia in its most dispiriting form because nothing new enters the picture — only the same energy in its shadow face.
The more exacting claim arrives in the final lines. Meaning, for Hillman, is not a product of the senex's ordering intelligence alone, nor of puerile inspiration alone. It lives in their coincidence. The beginning is always meaningful because the puer is present without the weight of what was lost; Saturn in exile is meaningful again because eros and prophetic insight return precisely when power fails to deliver on its promise. Between those two moments — genuine opening and genuine relinquishment — meaning tends to calcify into mere position-holding, which is what cynicism actually is: not scepticism, not earned disillusionment, but the senex structure without any puer light reaching it. The diagnosis is structural, not moral. You cannot will your way back into the coincidence; you can only notice when the idealism flattened into its own opposite, and track what that cost meaning in the process.
James Hillman·Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present·1967