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The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus — republished as Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood — is marie-louise-von-franz‘s extended seminar on the eternal-youth complex. Delivered originally as lectures, the book reads modern literary figures (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry through The Little Prince, Bruno Goetz through Der Gott und die Schlange) as case studies in the archetypal pattern by which a man remains bound to the mother, refuses commitment to the temporal life, and lives instead in the mode of provisional-life.
The diagnosis extends beyond the individual. Von Franz closes the volume by citing Alexander Mitscherlich’s Society Without the Father and by directing the reader to Jung’s “Answer to Job,” describing the “total inner man for whom the neurotic pueri aeterni of our days are unknowingly searching” (von Franz 1970). The puer-aeternus is in her reading a cultural figure, not merely a clinical one. A century without an adequate image of the father produces men who cannot descend into time; the archetypal complex is then a symptom of a collective arrest at the stage of mother-identification.
The book remains the standard depth-psychological treatment of the complex and the source of the vocabulary later Jungians — james-hillman on the puer-senex polarity, robert-l-moore on the King archetype — would inherit.