Men Who Never Grow Up – The ‘Puer Aeturnus Complex’

by Peter Milhado PHD on July 11, 2009

http://drpetermilhado.com/puer_complex.

Puer Aeturnus is Latin for ‘Eternal Youth’.  It is a concept from the psychology of Carl Jung and applies to those men who, even though they’re in their 30’s, 40’s or 50’s have retained the emotional characteristics of an adolescent.  Many of these men, referred to as Puers from now on, had fathers who were partially or totally absent.  Others had fathers who were weak and passive, which left the upbringing to the mother.  All Puers have an inappropriately strong tie to the mother, positive or negative.  If there is no essential differentiation from the mother, there is no masculinity.  A sense of masculinity has to be won by struggle; it is not a birthright!  This is done by taking a stand, overcoming inertia, deciding and acting more, reading and knowing more, by gaining muscle and gaining competence in the world of men (Hillman).  Puers are known for their wandering, their many relationships and sometimes Don Juanisms.  This has to do with seeking the perfect mother in every woman who will give them everything- always to be disappointed.  They are drawn to women who will admiringly reflect and not disturb their narcissistic self-image.  When the ‘in love’ stage is over and the Puer discovers that the woman is not a ‘goddess’, but quite mortal and human, the fascination with her vanishes.  The ‘goddess’ of old is now seen as a devouring and cold witch who wants to enslave him.   Events get even more complicated when the projection fits.  Many Puers are charming and attractive, but there is also a concealed sadistic streak one would hardly guess  was there until it strikes- many women will attest to that.  Charm might make a great first impression, but intimacy, commitment and involvement are needed in relationship.  The more excessive the Puer’s ‘nice guy’ and charming Persona, the more brutal and cold becomes his shadow.  At parties he stays long enough to enthrall and perhaps make a castrating remark to the man of the house before he exits.

The Puer’s main pursuit in life is ecstasy, many times at the expense of everything else.  This can be externalized in a highly symbolic fashion in fascination with flying or climbing mountains.  Many Puers hang out on ski slopes and racetracks.  Many are drawn to drinking, gambling, pornography and drugs to get that rush.

The Puer is impulsive and impatient, has a low frustration tolerance and does not reflect.  He isn’t only threatened by aging, but also by self-discipline, patience, duty, endurance and accepting limitations.  There is no time for standing still, tolerating conflict and solving problems.  He has to be on the move “where the action is”.  He does not like tasks requiring long preparations and training.  He can work, but only in a state of enthusiasm.  When he meets with routine, boredom or tediousness, which are part of every career, he usually quits and takes flight.  He can’t make a commitment in any part of his life.  Action is his fate rather than reflection. Marie Luise von Franz felt that underneath this relentless pursuit of ecstasy is either a need to return to the womb of unconditional love and bliss provided by mother or a secret longing for a religious experience.  One can find many Puers in  different religious settings in today’s spiritual supermarket.  Hillman, on the other hand, felt the Puer’s relentless wandering is a longing for the father and fathering.

Problems also arise when adapting to society.  The Puer envisions himself as a bringer of meaning, rather than one who has to adapt.  Hillman asks “The Puer may give us a sign, point the way, but will he give us a hand?”  The inflated feelings of being superior, along with arrogance and defiance lead to difficulties at work and in relationships.  Quite a few Puers don’t make it to mid-life; many of them die early in the ‘fast lane’ of drugs or impulsive adventure.  Some get lost in religious militancy or sell out to the ‘company’.  Still others flip over and surrender their individuality to clubs and organizations like the local softball team, the Elks, the Glee club or Alcoholics Anonymous.  Without consciousness, men with a Puer Aeternus complex always become victims to their impulsiveness and self-destructiveness or collective movements like pathological materialism; political extremism or religious fanaticism sweep them up.

It needs to be emphasized that the Puer suffers from a most painful and despairing condition.  To be on a never ending journey without a home, to pursue thrills and pleasures relentlessly at the expense of everything and everyone else, to impulsively defy society and women and yet need them desperately, to pay the price that lack of intimacy and commitment demands, to hungrily want success and not attain it, all leads to acute suffering and intense loneliness.  As nature is much kinder towards excessive indulgences, impulsiveness, and unconsciousness in youth, it is not until the middle of life that the Puer’s life becomes problematic.  The quest for euphoria always alternates with it’s opposite, namely dark and sinister moods of depression, irrational fears, physical breakdown or hypochondriasis.  After pride and arrogance, always come despair and depression.  It is in midlife that we get punished by our sins, not for them.  Hillman  feels the cure of the Puer lies in decay and in consciously facing wastage, affliction and moral horror.  The Puer needs to confront his need for immediate gratification, his inflatedness, his self-destructive and strong dependencies, which he denies.

One the positive side, the Puer’s willingness to begin anew, take risks, his spontaneity, potential creativity, childlikeness can be helpful, if he can harness this energy consciously and ethically.  The Puer archetype carries the hope of the ever-present potential of beginning anew.  We do not want to clip the wings of the Puer energy, it can serve all of us.  There are other men who are totally passive and have no fire at all and one wishes that somehow a ‘Puer spark’ would ignite some form of action and wake them from their pathetic slumber.

One for all and all for one.

Dr. Peter Milhado – Copyright © 2009

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puer_aeternus

Puer aeternus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically, it is an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.[1]

The puer in mythology[edit]

The words, puer aeternus, come from Metamorphoses, an epic work by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – c.17 AD) dealing with Greek and Roman myths. In the poem, Ovid addresses the child-god Iacchus as puer aeternus and praises him for his role in the Eleusinian mysteries. Iacchus is later identified with the gods Dionysus and Eros. The puer is a god of vegetation and resurrection, the god of divine youth, such as Tammuz, Attis and Adonis.[2] The figure of a young god who is slain and resurrected also appears in Egyptian mythology as the story of Osiris.

The puer in Jungian psychology[edit]

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung developed a school of thought called analytical psychology, distinguishing it from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In analytical psychology (often called "Jungian psychology") the puer aeternus is an example of what Jung called an archetype, one of the "primordial, structural elements of the human psyche".[3]

The shadow of the puer is the senex (Latin for "old man"), associated with the god Cronus—disciplined, controlled, responsible, rational, ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication, whimsy.[4]

Like all archetypes, the puer is bi-polar, exhibiting both a "positive" and a "negative" aspect. The "positive" side of the puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future. He also foreshadows the hero that he sometimes becomes (e.g. Heracles). The "negative" side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems.

"For the time being one is doing this or that... it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.... The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever."[5]

"Common symptoms of puer psychology are dreams of an imprisonment and similar imagery: chains, bars, cages, entrapment, bondage. Life itself...is experienced as a prison."[4]

When the subject is a female the Latin term is puella aeterna, imaged in mythology as the Kore (Greek for "maiden").[6] One might also speak of a puer animus when describing the masculine side of the female psyche, or a puella anima when speaking of a man's inner feminine component.

Cover of 1915 edition of J.M. Barrie's novel, first published in 1911.

C.G. Jung wrote a paper on the puer aeternus, "The Psychology of the Child Archetype", contained in Part IV of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, Vol. 9i). The hero-child aspect and his relationship to the Great Mother is dealt with in chapters 4 and 5 of Part Two of Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works, Vol. 5).[7] In his essay "Answer to Job" (contained in Psychology and Religion: West and East, Vol. 11 of the Collected Works; but also published separately) Jung refers to the puer aeternus as a figure representing the future psychological development of human beings.

"That higher and 'complete' (teleios) man is begotten by the 'unknown' father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—'vultu mutabilis albus et ater'[8]—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's 'Except ye become as little children' prefigures this change, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain."[9]

The Problem of the Puer Aeternus is a book based on a series of lectures that Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz gave at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, during the Winter Semester, 1959–1960. In the first eight of twelve lectures, von Franz illustrates the theme of the puer aeternus by examining the story of The Little Prince from the book of the same name by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The remaining four lectures are devoted to a study of a German novel by Bruno Goetz, Das Reich ohne Raum (The Kingdom Without Space), first published in 1919. Of this novel von Franz says:

"It is interesting that it was written and published before the Nazi movement came into being in 1933, before Hitler was ruminating on his morbid ideas. Bruno Goetz certainly had a prophetic gift about what was coming, and ... his book anticipates the whole Nazi problem, throwing light upon it from the angle of the puer aeternus".[10]

Now or Neverland is a 1998 book written by Jungian analyst Ann Yeoman dealing with the puer aeternus in the form of Peter Pan, one of the most well-known examples of the concept in the modern era. The book is a psychological overview of the eternal boy archetype, from its ancient roots to contemporary experience, including a detailed interpretation of J. M. Barrie's popular play and novel.

"Mythologically, Peter Pan is linked to...the young god who dies and is reborn...as well as to Mercury/Hermes, psychopomp and messenger of the gods who moves freely between the divine and human realms, and, of course, to the great goat-god Pan.... In early performances of Barrie's play, Peter Pan appeared on stage with both pipes and a live goat. Such undisguised references to the chthonic, often lascivious and far from childlike goat-god were, not surprisingly, soon excised from both play and novel."[11]

Peter Pan syndrome is the pop-psychology concept of an adult (usually male[12]) who is socially immature. The category is an informal one invoked by laypeople and some psychology professionals in popular psychology. It is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a specific mental disorder.

Dr. Dan Kiley popularized the Peter Pan syndrome in his 1983 book, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up;[13] his next book, The Wendy Dilemma (1984), advises women romantically involved with "Peter Pans" to improve their relationships.[14]

An example of the Peter Pan syndrome is used in Aldous Huxley's 1962 novel Island. In it, one of the characters talks about male "dangerous delinquents" and "power-loving troublemakers" who are "Peter Pans". These types of males were "boys who can't read, won't learn, don't get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency." He uses Adolf Hitler as an archetype of this phenomenon:[15]

A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co- operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here, unfortunately, he couldn't draw. His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for nonstop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars—that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf's retarded maturation.

— Aldous Huxley, Island

Notable modern-day Peter Pan[edit]

A prominent example of a celebrity with Peter Pan syndrome was Michael Jackson,[16][17] who said, "I am Peter Pan in my heart".[18] Jackson named the 2,700-acre Los Olivos, California property, where he lived from 1988 to 2005, Neverland Ranch[19][20] after Neverland, the fantasy island on which Peter Pan lives. He said that it was his way of claiming a childhood he never had, having started early as a performing artist with his family.[16][17] He had built there numerous statues of children, a floral clock, a petting zoo, a movie theater, and a private amusement park containing cotton candy stands, two railroads, a Ferris wheel, carousel, Zipper, Octopus, Pirate Ship, Wave Swinger, Super Slide, roller coaster, go-karts, bumper cars, a tipi village, and an amusement arcade;[21][22] As The New York Daily News staff writer, Carrie Milago, reported on 26 June 2009: "On Jackson's dime, thousands of schoolchildren visited over the years, from local kids to sick youngsters from far away." Visitors "often recalled it as dreamlike", she observed.[23] A preschool teacher visiting the site told USA Today in 2003, Neverland "smells like cinnamon rolls, vanilla and candy and sounds like children laughing".[23]

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