Our puer attitudes are not bound to youth, nor are our senex qualities reserved for age. The complete coincidence of psychological development and the biological course of life is yet to be established. The psyche seems to have its own course, its own timing. The senex as well as the puer may appear at many phases and may influence any complex. So we cannot fit psychological life into the historical conditions or the narrowly biological frames of a "first-half/second-half." To do so would be an early indication that we have ourselves too easily succumbed to the faulted thinking of the split archetype. If we look about us we see too well that the first-half/second-half scheme simply does not fit. Can the generation that is now to make the transition of the millennium put off until "some time later" the issues of meaning, of religion, of selfhood, meanwhile adapting to sociological and biological norms that have been handed them by another age and have lost their inherent value? A young person today is pressed to take up the problems of the second-half in the first-half. He has been born into a second-half, into the end of an age (as those of us who are older are forced to live a first-half of the wholly new spirit of the next age which is now beginning). We have not only our own problems; we have by historical necessity the collective problem of individuation loaded onto us. We carry a pack of history on our backs and are expected to meet the requirements of an old culture. Thus we start out as a puer senilis, both older than our age and struggling heroically against our oldness. The "puer problem" of today is not only a collective neurosis; it is a psychic expression of an historical claim, and as such is a call. If psychic energy is not able to flow through the usual external channels of tradition, it falls inward and activates the unconscious. The unconscious as "mother" makes it then appear as if all a young person's questioning and mal-adaptation were his own personal mother-complex. But it is a reflection of the transition and, as Jung says, "not of our conscious choosing." It reflects "the unconscious man within us who is changing." Can this unconscious man be put off until the second-half? The second-half is with us from the beginning, as is Saturn in our birth charts, just as the little boy and his question "why," the child Eros, and the winged angel are with us to the last. The puer inspires the blossoming of things; the senex presides over the harvest. But flowering and harvest go on intermittently throughout life.
— James Hillman
Hillman is refusing the developmental scaffold here — not updating it, refusing it. The life-stage framework Jung inherited from German Romanticism and passed into therapeutic common sense assumes the soul moves in biological time: adaptation first, meaning second, senex as the reward waiting at the end if you survive the first half intact. What Hillman sees instead is a historical dislocation so severe that the order has collapsed. You cannot defer the questions of meaning, death, and selfhood to a later developmental phase when the age itself is already a second-half condition. The soul does not wait for permission from the calendar.
The passage opens something that psychotherapy often forecloses: the possibility that a young person's so-called pathology — the mal-adaptation, the restlessness, the hunger for what no sociological norm can satisfy — is not a wound to be corrected but a historically accurate perception. The institutions built for orienting a life have lost their inherent value; the psyche knows this before the diagnostic categories do. When the traditional channels of transmission fail, energy turns inward, and what was a cultural inheritance becomes an apparently personal crisis. The mother-complex that appears in the clinic is often that: the soul's encounter with a void that precedes any individual family. The claim pressing on such a person is real, not neurotic. The question is whether it can be heard as a call rather than managed as a symptom.
James Hillman·Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present·1967