We are not concerned with the case history of our times and its anarchy, with the psychology of aging, of revolt and tradition, of youth, of fathers and sons, of stages of life, and such "timely topics." These are diversions. The soul is neither Jung nor old-or it is both. Our contemporary obsession with age and youth reflects the fall of the soul into the time and measurement system of historical materialism. Behind it all is an archetypal split. Therefore, our concern must be with archetypal therapy or therapy of an archetype. And our approach must be radical if we would put history back into the psyche. Thus we take historical problems as psychological symptoms in order to contain the speeding and spreading of these events. We shall try to hold them as psychological problems, regarding the splits in which we are caught as manifestations of an archetypal split within our individual souls. Furthermore, because of its special relation with time as process, this specific archetype will be involved with the process character of any complex, with the youth and age, the temporality and eternity conundrums of any psychological attitude or part of personality. Senex and puer are bound up with the very nature of development. Any attitude as it comes into being can take on the wings of the puer and streak skyward; any attitude as it passes its ripeness can lose touch with revelation, cling to its power, and be out of Tao. Lao Tzu says: "After things reach their prime, they begin to grow old, which means being contrary to Tao." [9] 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 Jung 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.
— James Hillman
Hillman's insistence here is not therapeutic advice — it is a correction of category. When the culture presents you with its generational anxieties, its transition-rituals, its mapped sequences of first-half becoming and second-half meaning, and asks you to locate yourself on the timeline, the move it is making is already the sickness, not the cure. The soul does not live in historical time that way. What looks like a crisis of youth or the unresolved business of midlife is really an archetypal split that has fallen into sociology and been given the false solidity of a developmental stage.
What this means practically is harder to hold. The puer is not your youth; the senex is not your future. Both are available to any complex, any attitude, at any phase — the skyward streak of new vision, the clinging to power past ripeness. You may be carrying the second half's weight of meaning and selfhood in what the culture insists is still your first half. You may be forced, at sixty, to live the beginning of something genuinely new rather than completing an arc. The *puer senilis* is not a diagnosis to escape; it is a description of what it costs to be individuating in historical time that has lost its center.
Fitting the psyche into the biological schedule is not neutral planning — it is already the split made policy.
James Hillman·Senex & Puer·2015