Marie Franz’s text with the psychological interpretation of the story of Amur/Eros and Psyche (see the article on “The Incarnation of Venus“) continues with an analysis of the correlation between Eros and the archetype of the“eternal child“, the so-called Puer Aeternus. For Eros is Puer Aeternus, and knowing this correlation helps tremendously if we want to understand where the main problems in our love relationships and partnerships come from. To begin with, it is good to know what the archetype of the eternal child is, which is referred to in analytical psychology by its Latin name – Puer aeternus for “eternal boy” and Puella aeretna for “eternal girl“. Daryl Sharp gives the following definition of this archetype:
“Latin for ‘eternal child,’ used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level, usually coupled with too great a dependence on the mother.
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. His lot is seldom what he really wants and one day he will do something about it — but not just yet. Plans for the future slip away in fantasies of what will be, what could be, while no decisive action is taken to change. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable”
Daryl Sharp, Lexicon, pp. 175
Like every archetype, this one has a positive and a negative side, although its negative manifestations are more often commented on because they are the subject of psychotherapy. This is especially clear in Marie Franz’s wonderful book “The Problem of Puer Aeternus“, which for me personally is the best book if we want to understand what the “mother complex” is in the male psyche. Because the puerile man is the immature mama’s boy and as such he is not capable of a real relationship with a woman. The same applies to Daddy’s ungrown girls. Much has been written on this topic, but to make it simple, I’ll boil down the basic characteristics of the puerile personality (whether male or female) to three main ones.
The first and most important is resistance to limitations and a desire for freedom. This, however, is freedom understood in its childish forms – to do whatever you want. In terms of relationships, this manifests itself as fear of commitment, Don Juanism, leading a temporary life. In terms of work – frequent job changes or standing unemployed for long periods of time.
The second, no less important, is laziness. Here again we can see the psyche of the child who likes to play but does not like to toil. So the moment things become difficult, it gives up. The puerile person lacks the inner strength to overcome the difficulties that are inevitably present in adult life. And difficulties in partner relationships are inevitable.
And related to this is the third characteristic – a rich fantasy life in which one imagines how one day he will do something special and great, but does not take the steps to realize it. There’s a lot of talking, but no doing. Although not every puerile individual is a distinct megalomaniac, there is a pretentiousness and desire to be special in everyone.
One could add more descriptions of this type of personality who outwardly appears adult but inwardly has not matured, but I believe even this is enough to understand what lies at the heart of the problem – resistance to pain, limitations, ordinariness. Instead of “puerile” we can talk about “immature”, but there is something in the word Puer that I personally find very appealing because it speaks the language of archetypes. It helps to understand why this personality type is so prevalent, and why such emotional immaturity is the root cause of problems in human relationships and intimate connections – immature Eros is incapable of building true love relationships.
To be able to build a meaningful relationship, we must first mature. We need the other opposite – the archetype of the old man, whose Latin name is Senex. Only when we unite this pair of opposites within ourselves will we be able to manifest our inner child in a positive way, namely as vitality, a creative attitude to life and playfulness. In other words, we can manifest our inner child in a positive way only when we grow up.
I trust you will find such a preliminary explanation helpful as you read another excerpt from Marie Franz’s analysis of the story of Amour and Psyche. And so:
“Ovid speaks of Eros as the puer aeternus. That is giving him the highest inner value. It has become a habit to speak of the puer aeternus, meaning by that a mother’s boy, as a bit homosexual, idealistic, and unadapted, someone likely to be artistic and to have megalomaniacal fantasies. But in labeling a man like this, we forget that we are using the name of a god. It is the name of the genius, Eros.
He represents the phenomenon which we know mostly in its negative context. If a man is a mother’s boy and lives as though he were eternal, as if he did not need to adapt to reality and a real woman, if he lives in savior fantasies as the man who will one day save the world or be the greatest philosopher or poet, he is wrongly identified with the puer aeternus figure.
He is identical with a god, and he has not yet detached his ego complex from it.
It has not yet grown out of the archetypal background, and the puer is sheer destructiveness.
Such boys, who are stuck in the mother complex, are absolutely unformed, and the collective scheme fits all the cases. When I lectured on the puer aeternus case, many people came up afterward and said that they knew who he was, and a lot of young men were named. However, I was lecturing on the case of a man who had never been in Zurich. It was just that the characteristics fitted an innumerable number of cases.
The positive mother complex in particular constellates the divine son-lover of the Great Mother.
Both together play the role of goddess and god, as Jung describes it in the first chapter of Aion. For a young man it is a great temptation to stay with the eternal mother, and he joins in by being the eternal lover. They help each other to stay outside life and do not face the fact that they are ordinary human beings.
The son cannot separate from the mother and prefers to live the myth and the role of the young god instead.
The image of the Self does not appear only as the puer but often also as the “wise old man”, but as puer it is eternally youthful and gives a creative impulse to man which enables him to see life from another angle. This can be felt especially in Goethe’s poems. In the “West-Eastern Divan,” for instance, the poet uses Islamic mysticism as the outer form: the tired old man calls a young slave to bring him wine, and he speaks to the youth with a slightly erotic tinge. That is an experience of the Self. The puer aeternus always conveys the feeling of eternal life, of life beyond death.
On the other hand, where there is identification with the puer, one finds the neurosis of the provisionary life; that means someday the boy hopes to become an important man. Such youths live in the wrong idea of immortality, missing the here and now, which has to be accepted because it is what makes the bridge to eternal life. This is the negative aspect.
If he grows up, however, and realizes that he has to adapt to reality and to leave the paradise of the mother, then the puer aeternus becomes what he always has been, something positive: an aspect of the Self. If he does not grow up, neither his ego nor the Self are pure, because everything is too contaminated. The ego is inflated, that is, it assumes the role of the archetype, and the archetype is not free either. Man assumes the role of a god, and the unfortunate thing for him is that he becomes unadapted, ill, and neurotic, and then puer aeternus in his aspect of the Self is also infected and becomes poisoned from his contact with human nature.
If we claim that this or that figure represents the self, this is a somewhat indefinite statement, since the self has many faces.
Eros would represent therein the aspects of creativity and vitality, as well as the capacity for being gripped by and feeling the meaning of life, for devoting oneself to the other sex and the search to find the right relationship, for being able to lift oneself beyond the boredom of life, to be moved religiously, to look for one’s own Weltanschauung, to support other people and to be able to help them.
A person who meets someone in whom Eros is alive feels the mysterious inner nucleus behind his humble human ego, for he has creativity, life, and vitality. A man who has assimilated the puer will, when he deals with a problem, shape it anew. One knows from literature that people of genius have a way of discussing problems from entirely new angles. There is a source of creativity within them which is a specific manifestation of the Self.
In the case of a positive mother complex the young man identifies with the puer aeternus and must give up this identification. In the case of the negative mother complex the man refuses completely the identification with the puer aeternus quality. He tends to be cynical and not to trust his own feeling, or women. He is in a state of constant restraint. He cannot give himself to life and smells danger everywhere.
One could say that in our novel, Milo symbolizes this kind of stinginess, he who does not risk anything and who always sees “the snake in the grass.” Therefore, in the man with the negative mother complex, the puer aeternus becomes a very positive inner figure which has to be assimilated so that he can progress out of his psychic narrowness and counterbalance his frozen attitude to life.
We know that Lucius wants to investigate the negative mother complex and therefore his big problem is the puer aeternus whom he must find. Contrary to Lucius, Eros himself has a positive mother complex. He has an incestuous dependency on Venus and therefore has some difficulty in marrying. His problem is exactly the opposite of Lucius’s.
Remember that at first Eros and Psyche live happily united in the darkness of a faraway castle. She is happy but does not know what her husband looks like. Her jealous sisters find out about this hidden happiness and instruct Psyche to take a knife and kill him, because, they say, he is a snake or a dragon. We have to think what the jealous sisters stand for inwardly in a man. Erich Neumann takes them as shadow figures of Psyche. If we take it as a problem of a woman, this is true; her shadow is then projected onto her sisters, who want to destroy her happy marriage with the man she loves. If we take it as an anima problem, the sisters would represent the negative aspect of the anima. Her outstanding characteristic is jealousy, which would cause the poisoning of the anima through the negative mother aspect. The feelings coming from the negative mother poison the inner experience of life.
The negative sisters who ruin Psyche are both unhappily married, having married for money and power, and they obviously represent a destructive side of the power complex, which destroys every true feeling relationship. They symbolize the greedy, envious force, the jealousy, possessiveness, and miserliness of the soul which does not want to give itself to an inner or outer love experience, together with the inability to get away from the banal aspect of life.
The man with the positive mother complex does not know this, for in his conscious behavior he tends to trust women too much. But if one knows him better, one discovers that he has this distrustful jealousy somewhere in the background of his feeling. Where there is a negative mother complex, the man will be jealous, distrustful, possessive, and anxious in his behavior toward women, but in the unconscious behind that, he remains very naive and shy, only because he is afraid to expose his feelings too much.
I once analyzed a man with a negative mother complex who had lived with his aunt. She was a hysterical, horrible old woman. It was really a fairy-tale-like story. She imprisoned him to such an extent that he could not even leave the flat during the day. He had to make the beds and clean the floors, was never allowed to go out, and was even forced to live with her sexually. This was in 1940 in Switzerland! The man escaped his aunt, entered analysis, and spoke of all women as damned witches.
After some time he decided to give up his homosexual leanings and intended to take up connections to young women. But one cannot escape such a problem by conscious decision, so he had to work a lot more. For some strange reason he trusted me completely from the first day, but in such an unreal way that my heart sank. He asked for the meaning of his dreams and believed everything I said. I was apprehensive because nothing is more depressing than to be trusted more than one deserves. He did not see that I was an ordinary human being, but took everything I said for gospel. The result was a miraculous cure: his symptoms disappeared in two months. It was uncanny to me and reached the borders of magic; then he fell too much into the optimistic puer aeternus attitude, the reverse of the negative mother complex. Fortunately, after much more analytical work he really came out of his troubles.
Since then I have learned to expect such a reaction, knowing that where there is a negative mother complex, suddenly the puer aeternus will come out in the divine form, a divine naiveté which is not up to life as it really is, or women as they really are. After having switched from one to the other, he had to grow up to a middle attitude and learn to go into relationships without complete distrust or the limitless trust of a little boy.
But I could have done nothing for him if I had misused my power. I had to wait and avoid every power attitude. I tried from time to time to put a little skepticism into his trustfulness, and when I gave him the interpretation of a dream, I asked him if he really believed it, trying to get him to be more critical and to listen to his own judgment instead of saying, always, “Yes.”
At the end it so happened that one day he needed me badly. At that time I had the flu and could not see him. That gave him a shock, and suddenly he saw that I was an ordinary human being who could even fall ill. For the first time he realized that I was not a divine daimon or goddess but could get the flu, and that gave him a hint that he should grow up, that to leave everything in my hands was not quite safe. So he pulled himself together and began to think about his relationship to me and what it meant.”
- Source: Amor & Psyche – Marie Louise von Franz, “The Golden Ass of Apuleius”
Next sequel: Psyche’s first descent into the unconscious and the symbolism of the lamp
