The "child" is therefore renatus in novam infantiam. It is thus both beginning and end, an initial and a ter-minal creature. The initial creature existed before man was, and the terminal creature will be when man is not. Psychologically speaking, this means that the "child" symbolizes the pre-conscious and the post-conscious nature of man. His pre-conscious nature is the uncon-scious state of early childhood; his post-conscious nature is an anticipation by analogy of life after death. In this idea the all-embracing nature of psychic wholeness is expressed. Wholeness is never comprised within the compass of the conscious mind-it includes the indefinite and indefinable extent of the unconscious as well. Wholeness, as a matter of empirical fact, is therefore of immeasurable extent, older and younger than con-sciousness and enfolding it in time and space. This is no speculation, but an immediate psychic experience. Not only is the conscious process continually accompanied, it is often guided, helped, or interrupted, by unconscious happenings. The child had a psychic life before it had consciousness. Even the adult still says and does things whose significance he only realizes later, if ever. And yet he said them and did them as if he knew what they meant. Our dreams are continually saying things beyond our conscious comprehension (which is why they are so useful in the therapy of neuroses). We have inti-mations and intuitions from unknown sources. Fears, 134 Child with a Lamp, wearing a cucullus moods, plans, and hopes come to us from invisible causes. These concrete experiences are at the bottom of our feeling that we know ourselves little enough; at the bottom, too, of the painful conjecture that we might have surprises in store for ourselves. Primitive man is no puzzle to himself. The question "What is man?" is the question that man has kept until last. Primitive man has so much psyche outside his conscious mind that the experience of something psychic outside him is far more familiar to him than to us. Con-sciousness guarded round about by psychic powers, or sustained or threatened or deluded by them, is the age-old experience of mankind. This experience has pro-jected itself into the archetype of the child, which expresses man's wholeness. The "child" is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the triumphal end. The "eternal child" in man is an inde-scribable experience, an incongruity, a disadvantage, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that deter-mines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a per-sonality.
— C. G. and Kerényi, C. Jung
Jung's insistence that this is "no speculation, but an immediate psychic experience" is worth pausing over. The child archetype's peculiar double horizon — older than consciousness, younger than its end — is not a metaphysical proposal about eternity. It is a description of something actually felt: the sense that what moves through you was not authored by you, that you said or did something whose meaning arrived only afterward, if at all. Every person who has ever looked back at a decision and thought *I didn't know what I was doing* has felt the edges of the child's territory.
What makes this passage quietly unsettling is the phrase "an incongruity, a disadvantage, and a divine prerogative." Jung refuses the clean resolution. The child is not simply a symbol of renewal or potential — the reassuring register that swallows this material fastest. It is also a wound in the personality, something that will not be domesticated by maturity, something that remains, as the Latin has it, *abandoned and exposed* even inside the accomplished adult. The wholeness Jung means is not a state one achieves but a magnitude one discovers oneself already inside, with consciousness as a small lit room and the rest of the house unmapped and making sounds. That the house has always been making sounds is the discovery. What it says is another matter entirely.
C. G. and Kerényi, C. Jung·Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis·1949