THE NARCISSISTIC BASIS OF THE 'PUER AND PUELLA PERSONALITY STRUCTURE By Jeffrey Satinover | October 26, 1978 Tt was originally in my work at Zurich that I got involved in this whole area. 1 started out pursuing the question of ore parti- very gifted individuals have. That area led. ism very rapidly. covery led to a pecul: dard; cissistic problems) is‘that gifted ind: their upbringing, will develop narciss almost perfectly the neuroses develope: under certain developmental circumsta: gifted individuals, was something like you have the One of the things that I discovered 'y Jungian approach to nar- viduals, regardless of istic neuroses that mimic din less gifted individuals inces. Thus, by examining six hundred people at the Zurich Institute, Probably a major portion of whom The Institute had more or less become he Westernmost watering Spot: on the journey to the East. were pert of one gort or another. Now the problem is fascinating namely that Jungian psychology, 28,Juns developed it, specifically addresses the protiens “of the acters tet Cf life. Why then, ao so many people who are“puée sa aeterni become attracted to this particular psychology? so inopening up this whole area there is a lot of reflection which we can do on our own involvement in Jungian psychology or, if not that, we can at least: reflection our neighbor's; involvement.”'- The puer has been a concern because of many of the obvious and grossly neurotic aspects of his psychology, in particular what goes under the rubric.of the inability to grow up, more specifi- @ally, the inability to make any kind of a lasting achievement in’ some sector of life, and probably most painfully, the inability to form stable and lasting relationships. For society the puer is a problem because he or she tends to fall into very profound |. identifications with cults and ideologies, and a’ population rife with pueri is probably most prone to destructive political mass movements. On the other hand, -the same individuals.whom you can criticize from this point of view also happen to be those individuals: who are the most imaginative, the most original in their thinking, who have maintained a sense of idealism about what life could be «at: about. Therefore, we are in a dilemma: How do you “cure” the X uer without eliminating all those qualities which are essential ~ fora vital and imaginative existence? What is probably the most painful feature of puer psychology for the Jungian analyst to Piserve is the fact'that those very spiritual qualities which Jungian psychology holds out as,an important aspect of the develop- ment of the personality are the:same qualities in the puer which seem actually to generate many of the neurotic characteristics: self-serving and manipulative relationships, an unwillingness to deal with the “here and now,” all in the name of transcendental values whose worth we have a hard time denying. Puer psychology is becoming increasingly widespread. Von Franz Sbserved this in Switzerland twenty years ago. In the United States our whole culture is a youth culture. This notion is “already a cliche. The values of the puer are in. effect presented: to us everywhere both subliminally and explicitly. The questions - .that I am going to try to address today are these: why is-this happening? .Why is there an increase - in the puer personality type? low do we evaluate ite Is it simply something good? Is is something * bad? Is something in between? And most impor- tantly, what do we do about it? and how? These questions have already -been dealt. with in a number of ways. But there is still a lot of puzzlement. Further,there is a great @eal of dissention amongst Jungians,as to what constitutes the appropriate treatment for the puer aeternus. - In fact I don't believe any satisfactory answer has-been found yet.ich SSRIS SSS ESO 3 There are currently two contrasting approaches to the analysis of the puer aeternus, and both of them focus on the problem of the past tn-the Ran~ One is the notion thet the pusy is essentiaily an individual who hes an unresolved. atesa t/ separation problem with his mother. This attachment problem is viewed as resolvable and, therefore, leads to a therapeutic approach which basically says that the attachment should be broken and the individual should grow out of the puer mode. The other approach essentially says that the puer is not so much suffering from an attachment to the mother as he ia suffering from an absent father (whether that father be considered the concrete father or the spiritual father), and that he is in effect on a quest.. This quest is something which he should not give up because it is some~ thing that he needs, and further, we all benefit from its fruits. The first approach lends itself to a reductive analysis, in the Jungian sense of the word. The second approach tends to produce a synthetic analysis, also in Jung's specific meaning of the word. There are a number of problems with both of these approaches. The problems are widely discussed, although they have not been packaged quite so neatly as I am going to try to present them to you right now. These are the problems: First, both analyses accept the idea that the puer is essentially characterized by a weak ego structure. The first approach aims at restoring ego strength, perhaps at the expense of a certain degree of imaginative capacity or at the expense of a degree of closeness to the unconscious. The second approach both accepts the existence of the weak ego and encourages it. It says, in effect, that in our culture the ego has itself ~~ become innately hypertrophic, and that we do not need any more of it. It is just fine that we should strive to have less of it. The devaluation of the hero myth thereby is viewed as a necessary means to a fuller life of the imagination. ‘The weakness of the ego in both approaches is seen behavioraly as the incapacity to complete tasks once they have been begun, or as a habit of procrastination, . or as the inability to work steadily. So there is a particular kind of work disturbance. Now the flaw in the assumption that the pro- blem (or the value) is a weak ego is quite simply the fact that a great many pueri show no sign whatsoever of a weak ego. Many puer asterni can be found in positions of great authority, responsibility, and leadership. Probably no more significant example for American society exists than Jack Kennedy. Furthermore, workaholtsm ts just as common a work disturbance amongst puer_acterni as is Tas s laziness so that there is a whole class of individuals who are puer aeterni for whom this supposition that they do not work is precisely wrong, in fact, oppositely wrong. It is extremely common also to find an individual beginning life as a classically described puer seternus who suddenly panics around age thirty and turns into the workaho: type. ‘This seems to have happened to the culture as a whole some- where around December 31, 1969. In any case, what we need to find4 is a more fundamental etiology that can produce either laziness, to use a general rubric, or workaholism. It is something more profound than either symptom, just as we need to look for a source of the problem that is deeper than either an unresolved attachment to the mother oz a missing father. It somehow has to include both of those. The second problem is that the prescribed treatments do not work. _ Both Jung and von Franz openly acknowledged that telling a puer to work fails. Anybody who has tried this approach in therapy will simply provoke more intense resistance. On the other hand, the quest for an enhanced imaginative ability (the other, synthetic, approach) is only possible within circumscribed limits, for the obvious reason that we are all born with differing degrees of imaginative potential. Native talent has to be taken into account, and no system has yet been devised which will turn an ordinary man into a genius or a sage, in spite of psychological, literary, mystical, archetypal, or chemical boosters. The third problem is that neither analysis accounts sufficiently for the fact that puer psychology is just as common and essentially identical in both the man and the woman, It is true that a man's relationship to his mother, or to his father, or to the mother or father archetypes, will color his general psychology. However, there is no way of explaining from relationships to the parental archetypes or from relationships to the personal parents why both the man and a woman will essentially produce identical symptoms when you are discussing the puer aspect of theiz personality. Once again, we need to look for some derivation that is deeper than either of those two archetypes o= the two parental relation- ships. The fourth problem is commen to the. previous three. There seems to exist a very precise complementarity amongst all the various theoretical attributions to each of the puer characteristics. 1 do not have the time to go over this in detail. It is something you might want to think about. But, just to give you an example of.what I mean, flight fantosies, and. flight behavior in general are typical symptoms of the puc:, But, you can call this either flight from the mother or flight to the father, and there is a perfect complomentation involved in that. If you go down the list of all the various puer characteristics not only will you find that you will be able to give an equally legitimate explanation by deriving it from the father or from the mother, but also you will find that there is complementation involved. In effect, what you seem to be getting is the parental relationship reflected in the puer's behavior rather than oither individual, (or, in archetypal terms, the puer is the product of a coniunctio, not of one archetype or the ocher). if we were to talk about this in psychoanalytic terms, as Otto Rank did in discussing the psychology5 of the artist, we would assert that the typical "artistic" personality, especially the so-called failed artist, suffers from excessively strong Oedipal conflicts. This translates into the fact that he suffers from a very strong attachment to his mother and a very strong conflict with his father. The two things go together and it is not possible to separate them, The fifth problem involves the role of the mother. Pueri are, of course, traditionally supposed to be derivative of a certain kind of mother, and that is the smothering mother. But, as a matter of fact, pueri are just as commonly found from so-called negative mothers. The overly positive mother and the overly negative mother will both likely generate puer psychology. The same is true with the father. An excessively positive or an excessively negative father will each produce Ppuer psychology. + Thus, we need to look for an explanation which can take into account all these various dichotomies. What I am going to try to do is present a basic model and try to show how, from this rather simple model, all the characteristics - of the puer can be explained. This model includes both sides of the dichotomies that I have outlined. Now, instead of building up to @ dramatic conclusion and saying, "This is the answer,” at the end, I am going to tell you what my opinion is about this right at the beginning. In fact, it has already been stated “by the Preceding lecturer. The essential problem in the s the problem of identity. That, in my opinion, is the key. It is the single common factor. it is something that we all know already, and yet we hardly ever talk about it in a Jungian frame of reference. The fact that we do not talk about it stems from the unfortunate fact that Jungians have not yet developed a Jungian concept of identity. So, naturally, that is what I am going to try to do first. The concept of identity is a funny one. It is one of those words that we all use. We refer to it all the time in everyday speech. We will find our patients: using the word commonly, We have a vague idea of what it means. Nemely, we think of it loosely as meaning having a sense of who you are, whatever that is. You might not even be able to put it into words, but you have some feeling that you know who you are, or you don't know and suffer from it. But there is an essential feature of identity which is inherent in its definition. It is actually the way the word entered the language crd-it points to the aspect of identity which is psychologically relevant. In its psychological usage, the word first entered the English language with Locke. He wrote, as an example, “Consciousness always accompanies thinking. In this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rationalbeing." In other words, the essential feature of identity is not Zo much the specific content, ‘the capacity that you have to answer the question, “who am I?7", but rather the sense that whatever that answer might be, it is the same answer from moment to moment. It is the persistence of a stable sense of identity Gr a stable sense of who one is that is the core feature of identity. the essential aspect of puer and puella psychology is not simply the inability to give an answer to the question, “who am I,” but Father the fact that the answer changes dramatically, that it is hot a stable answer. In fact, pueri will often form very intense identifications with a certain personality image. They will say; "Sam this." It is not that they do not feel they have an identity, at least consciously, but rather that this identity is apt to change. Often it will change a great number of times in just a few years. Té we accept this idea, we can quickly see why puer and puella psychology does not respect sexual differences but cuts across thom. Puer or puella is by this definition not characterized by a particular ‘sort of masculine personality, whether that be the heeo, the son-lover, the mother's boy, or by a particular sort of feminine personality, hero's lover, animus-possessed, or father's daughter. Rather it is characterized by the absence of any on continuous, stable, personal identity at all, Back in the 1960's this was called "going through the changes." Now strictly speaking, identity is not a content of consciousness, as for example, a thought, an emotion, a memory or the image of @ dream. But it is not an autonomous complex or function or structure of the psyche, either as is the shadow, the anima, or the ego. In other words, one of the reasons why it is hard to grasp what identity is, is that we do not really have a clear Gonception of what it constitutes. It does not really have a place amongst the various Jungian divisions of the psyche. One Way to understand it is to perceive it as a sensing of a relation ship that prevails amongst all these structures. In other words, identity is not a psychic thing so much as a quality that stems from the way all the parts of the psyche relate to one another. When all the parts of the psyche are relatively conflict-free, when there is a functional unity amongst all the parts, then identity will be sensed. When there is not a functional unity, when there is opposition amongst the various parts of the psyche, the sense of identity is absent. Another way of speaking about this, of speaking about~the func— tional unity of all the parts of the psyche, is to say that the Self is constellated. Now, what I’mean by this, and here I am introducing a distinction that is unfamiliar to classical theory, is that the Self cannot be correctly spoken of as always existing.7 There is an aspect of the Self, a transcendental aspect of it, which is always there. But there is also that aspect of the Self which is part of our personal experience, and that is some- thing which comes and goes. When there is a functional unity amongst the parts of the psyche, the Self is experienced as constellated, or its effects are experienced. When that func- tional unity does not prevail, we can speak about the Self as being absent or as being fragmented as I will get to in a moment. We are apt to think of experiences of the Self as special, rare, and numinous, and on occasion this is so. This can happen in childhood, during a crisis, ox dnwold age. It can be marked by an experience of great numinosity: an impressive dream, a vision of the great white light, or even of God. We can think of these experiences as moments in which the Self itself actually appears in consciousness directly. But there are other states of the Self. There are times when the Self is constellated, but the ego does not experience it consciously. A very simple example of this would be when you have a dream, a great and impressive dream, and you forget it. Another state is when the Self is not constellated. Now, if we take these three states and look at two of them, the state of the constellation of the Self and the state of its not being constellated, we can ask the question, how does the indivi- dual introspectively experience himself in these two different. states? The answer is that the consequence in consciousness of the Self being constellated is the experience that we call "having a sense of identity," even though you cannot put it into words. When the Self is not consteliated, the individual senses an absence of identity. So whether or not the person consciously has an exper- dence of the Self in the form that Jung most frequently describes the’ Self has an effect on consciousness. Its presence or absence will influence decisively the individual, particularly in this area of whether he experiences himself as having an identity or not. Now the basic approach I am going to take stems from this idea. In other words, what we are going to look at are various states of the Self and try to correlate these states with the prevailing states in consciousness and ultimately with the be- haviors that are apt to stem from them. But before doing so, I want to briefly discuss narcissism both because narcissism appears in the title of this lecture and in a number of other lectures as well, You will recall that the term narcissism comes from Ovid's story of a beautiful young man who fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water-and either pined away or drowned as a result of it. The psychoanalysts first picked up this term to express: an individual's excessive self-absorptionsin distinction from his capacity to relate to others. Now, let me giv> you a thumbnail sketch of Preud's thinking and Jung's thinking about narcissism. Freud held that we all begin life in a:state which he called primary narcissism. This state of primary narcissism essentially8 is a state in which the individual experiences no separation between himself and the outer world. As a consequence of there being no subject-object dichotomy, there is no experience of (consciousness of) drives or of instincts or of desires to be frustrated. In other words, in order to have a desire you must have an experience of both yourself and of some object that you want. You have to have a preceding experience of "me" and "not me" before you can even experience a desire. So the state of primary narcissism is considered blissful in precisely the sense that the mystics talk about a state of not having any desires as being blissful. This state would correspond to Neumann's uroboric state. As the infant develops, the first thing that happens is that there is a separation between itself and objects in the outer world. With that comes the arousal of desires whose source is presumed to be instinctive needs. Haturally, those needs are already there, but what is happening now is that the child is beginning in a very simple way to become aware of those desires and to become avare of those needs. As he grows, he will seek various weys of fulfilling them. As he gets increasingly competent at it, he will develop object relations. He will learn to relate to objects. He will also learn to manipulate the world of objects in such a way that he can satisfy his own desires. Freud presumed that if that process failed, if for some reason the person had a desire, sought a means to fulfill it and was unable to fulfill it, the consequence would be that in order to experience the satisfaction of desire, he would retreat to the earlier form of satisfaction he had when he was younger. In other words, it is easier to go back to the state of primary narcissism, and fulfill your desire that way, than it is to work or to make some kind of an effort to force the world to bend to your desires. This return, this second approach to the initial state of narcissism Freud called secondary narcissism. To put it in a nutshell, Freud basically presumed that most neuroses had this process at their core. In other words, there is a regressive maneuver used to satisfy a desire when the more difficult route of adaptation has failed. Now, Jung made a couple of very important extensions of this idea. First, he pointed out that the regressive movement back to the original state of narcissism is not in itself a pathological Ranuever, but that it actually serves an, important purpose. What happens is that when the individual retreats to the archaic ‘state, archetypal fantasies are released. These archetypal fantasies are the expression in imagery of instinctive, inherent processes of adaptation that have as yet not been evoked and utilized. Analogously, although en individual develops a fever because the body's immune system is coming into play, the fever itself is not the illness. The fever is the sign that a compensatory Process has been set into motion. That was one extension. that Jung made. The second extension that Jung made was his realization9 that the capacity to turn inward, to retreat, and, therefore, acquire additional modes of instinctive adaptation, is not only called into play in pathological circumstances as a con- Pensatory function, but is actually a continuing and ongoing Part of psychic life. ‘There is a part of psychic life which is always concerned with adaptation. There is also a part of psychic life which is always turning backwards on the self. At the point that he made this distinction, he then changed words. Whereas he originally equated narcissism and introversion, he then began using introversion to refer to the normal process of the individual going back and turning in on himself. One of the consequences of this idea is that we can change fron Perceiving neuroses as narcissistic at their core to talking about narcissistic neuroses. In other words, there are neuroses . _. that have to do with consistent failure of adaptation to the outside world. But there are as well neuroses that have to do with a failure of adaptation to the inner world. In other words, there are neuroses in which the process of narcissism, the necessary process of narcissistic reflection, is itself inter- fered with. It is a different kind of problem than failure of adaptation to the outer world. Another essential feature of puer-puella psychology is just this: we tend to look at pueri as suffering from (or gifted with: the synthetic approach!) a failure of adaptation to the outer world. In fact, I think that that is only a secondary symptom and that the essential problem in puer psychology is not a failure of adaptation to the outer world. That is why many of them, in fact, are very well-adapted indeed. The problem is rather a failure of development in the inner world. It is an essentially narcissistic or introverting problem. There is a disturbed capacity to reflect on one's self. At this point I have introduced two different ideas about hat constitutes puer-puella psychology. One is the idea that it is @ problem of identity. The other that it is a problem of intro- verted reflection. I am sure yon will be able to see right away that the two problems are essentially the same, that they condi~ tion one another. If we were to take a look at the myth of Narcissus in the way that Jung took a look at myths when he first discovered mythology, we can ask the question, why is it that Narcissus falls in love with his reflection? ‘And the answer would be, (and we are thus analysing Narcissus) that presumably he has fallen in love with what he needs and with what he has been unable to become conscious of otherwise. Using classical Jungian theory, he has projected something, and he has fallen in love with it,.and he has projected it because he is unconscious of it. And what is it that he is unconscious of? He is uncon- scious of himself. In other words, it is the absence of any10 experience of who he is that makes him fall in love with that reflected image. We could say in other words, that he turns outwardly to gain an experience of who he is rather than performing that act inwardly. And that is the essential feature that will lead to the various behavioral disturbances of the puer. We could turn this around as well and point out that one of the basic functions of introversion is precisely to maintain a stable sense of identity. Now, this may sound unnecessarily trivial, and it would be if we just left it at that. It can go further. Herman Melville in Moby Dick, wrote . this: 3 "and still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus who, because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable «Phantom of life, and this is the key to it all." Indeed the whole question of identity, if pursued far enough, will lead into the very deepest waters of all. It is a classical, mystical technique to simply ask that question over and over and over again, deeper and deeper, until the question itself leads you into the deepest aspect of the Self. But, just as pursuing that question deeply will lead to the deep transcendental side of the Self, the presence of the Self and the capacity to turn inward and experience it, if not in one of the numinous ways, then to experience it directly as a sense of identity, is what introversion is fundamentally there for. Now, I am not going to go into this deeper aspect of the question of "who am I?" and the roots of identity in the deep aspect of the Self. I am going to be staying somewhat more on the surface. What happens if the introverted relationship to one's Self is disturbed? Just asa long, healthy, developing relationship with another person rests on an unspoken core of basic trust, 80,too, the life-long relationship with one's Self, the healthy development of narcissism or introversion, rests on the presence of this unspoken answer. And similarly, just as the lack of trust in a relationship with another will lead to severe dis- turbances in that relationship, the deep lack of a sense of answer to the question “who am 1?" will lead over years to a disturbed relationship to one's Self. Just as the person who essentially cannot trust his companion expends his energy in the constant, fruitless effort to gain and then regain assurances of loyalty, 80, too, does a person who lacks a sense of identity expend his energy, like Narcissus, in constant, repeated, selfish- seeming efforts to obtain what he Racks. In short, the propern development of introversion rests on the deep-seated sense of having an identity. We will see how the lack of a sense of identity affects both the puer's relationship to himself and secondarily, his relationship to others. I have a lot of material. Therefore, I am going to try and condense quite a bit at. this point, so there will be gaps. What we need to look at is: what events in childhood lead to 2 disturbed constellation of the Self? There are basically two routes by which the Self can be disturbed. Let me first give you a brief description of what would constitute the ideal (I will not call it a normal) process of development. When‘a ghild is very young, he originally gains a sense of being an individual from the way the environment responds to him.” In particular this will be the mother more often than not, because the mother is the so-called primary caretaker. How she responds to the child, whether she responds to the child as the child actually is, or whether she responds to the child as she fantasizes the child to be, and the child is not, will have a crucial effect on whether the Self is going to be constellated. Ideally, the Self will, in fact, be spontaneously constellated in a young child. At that point the child will behave in certain ways. Given that this is a very young personality and given that the child has no experience of relationship to the outer world, there -——- will be a kind of an unmodified expression of the Self. Tt is that appearance of the Self which gives rise to the often observed grandicsity, fantasies of omnipotence, and of magical povers and So on that very young children have. ‘The mother or the father need to recognize that this is an expression of the Self, that this is not a faulty development of the ego, this is not a faulty estimation that the child has of his place in the world. If the Parents recognize that this is an expression of the Self, then they will be in proper degree supportive of it and will not do anything to undermine that experience. The result will be that over years the child has in effect a very large estimation of himself which is being supported to a degree by his parents. He is taking that estimation of himself out into the world and he is getting frustrated when he brings it into the world. But this frustration is also of a proper degree, and it is something that over a period of many, many years will lead to a modification of the image of himself. In other words, at the moment that the Self is constellated, the, child acquires a grandiose sense of identity. “That grandiose sense of identity will slowly be reduced and diminished as the child grows. However, at the end of a process of development the central experience of speciainess, uniqueness, grandiosity will remain, He will, in other words, have a basic contact with the experience of the Self that will Persist throughout his life. In effect the way the process will12 work is that as the child gets increasingly frustrated, he is also developing skills and tools for dealing with the world. At some point, usually late in adolescence, the fantasies of himself, which have been generated by the constellated Self, and his actual concrete capacities will meet. In other words, his self-image generated by the Self will slowly decrease at the same time that his actual physical skills are increasing. Ideally, around late adolescence the two will meet. At that point a new process sets in where the individual then verifies his sense of identity through concrete achievements of some sort or another. Needless to say, this does not happen very often. There are two basic ways that this ideal process can go wrong. The first is that the constellation of the Self in childhood can consistently be’attacked. This comes from what we call the negative parent. The other way is that the constellation of the Self can be excessively supported. Either extreme will, in fact, produce the same result. In the first instance, what is happen~ ing is that the child's elf is constellated, the parent attacks this Self, and the Self returns then to a state of not being constellated. In other words, we could say that the Self goes into a state of fragmentation. (I will talk about that in more detail later.) Every time the Self attempts to reconstellate, the parent attacks it, and it goes back to the state of frag- mentation. Ultimately, the individual will internalize the parental criticism and begin doing that to himself, so that as an adult he will have the very typical symptom of having an inflated fantasy and then immediately saying, “That's an inflated fantasy." Instantly the Self will return to its preceding state of fragmentation. So there is a constant cycling between two states. (*See diagram. I realize this does not help you too much, but I am going to be referring to this frequently. Besides Jungians are fond of diagrams. I did not want to leave one out.) This attitude of the parent that becomes internalized, is similar to what von Franz describes as the mother's attack on the boy's masculinity. However, I do not think that that formulation is precisely correct. Analogously, many of the modern Freudians who discuss problems of narcissism could criticize the classical Freudian interpretation, namely that the individual's phallic aggressiveness is being attacked. In other words, the distinction that I want to make here is that it is not an attack on masculi- nity, it is not an attack on the phallus, it is not an attack on a boy's aggressiveness. It is an attack on the existence of a separate Self, the existence of a separate and distinct individual. If we wanted to make a language distinction, we could say that it is not phallic aggression that is being attacked, but assertive- ness per se. In many fields today, the discussion rages as toBn 13 whether women should or should not be aggressive because being aggressive is a masculine trait. But maybe it is not. I think the whole discussion misses the point, because generally speaking what is attacked is not the masculinity, the masculine component which we might be willing to call aggression, but rather the assertiveness which has to do with will as the expression of a separate individual. The most distinctive feature of the individuality of a person is just that, his sense of being individual, of being different, of being distinct. That sense of distinctness and uniqueness, which is an inherent component of identity, extends to grandeur and specialness. The sense of grandeur and the sense of being special are the natural, emotionally experienced extensions of being an individual. Naturally, once you accept this model you can see that the problem can stem from either the mother or from the father or both. It is not inherently sex-determined. It will happen to little girls just as much to little boys. Puelli will be, therefore, as common as pueri. ‘The cycling between states of grandeur in which the Self is constellated in its form from childhood and a state of fragmen- tation is the most typical introspective feature of puer and Puella psychology. In other words, once a puer has reached the State where he can honestly express his internal states, and he is not defending against them in various ways, the most typical feature of puer-puella psychology becomes evident. That is to say, there isa constant cycling back and forth between what can vaguely be called inflation and depression. What is happening here in the adult is that the Self, which has an inherent dynamic to want to constellate, to produce the development of the per- sonality which has been blocked all through life, will constantly attempt a reconstellation. When it reconstellates it will re- constellate in the form that it originally was in the beginning. In other words, there is a constellation of a childhood self in the adult, and, therefore, this is accompanied by what we call infantile states of grandeur, specialness, feelings of unique- ness, etc. Similarly, the experience of fragmentation is a return to the state of fragmentation that preceded the constellation of the Self, The parent who is constantly supportive produces the same problem because, in effect, what is happening is that it is not the constellation of the Self that is being interfered with but rather the frustrating experiences from the outside world that would modify the Self. The parent, in other words, protects the individual from frustration with the consequence that the Self never gets modified and “shrunk," so to speak, so that it remains in its infantile state and is extremely liable to frag- mentation.pt There is a third source which I am not going to go into in a lot of detail. This is puer and puella psychology in spite of the most ideal upbringing, and as I mentioned at the be- ginning, this third source is the presence of great talent of some sort. Because, in effect, the presence of giftedness serves as the equivalent of an excessively supportive parent. Just as the excessively supportive parent gives a constant message to the child that his most grandiose and inflated fantasies are perfectly realistic, the very gifted individual while he is young gets that verification from his own perfor- mance. He, too, enters adulthood with the Self in its essen- tially childhood state and,’therefore, is similarly liable to fragmentation and reconstellation. Now, if we take this basic model, we can look at some of the commonly recognized features of the puer-puella syndrome and show how they relate to it. The most wvfous connection is simply the fact that the sense of identity is very closely tied to the underlying state of the Self. In the puer very little of it is, in fact, derived from or capable of verification by achievements of the ego in the physical or social worlds. Because the sense of identity is so closely tied to this cycling of the Self.in its childhood form, no amount of accomplishment, no relationship, no matter how ideal or satisfactory, is ever sufficient. There is a constant yearning for something which is, in fact, unobtainable. That is, namely, the experience of the Self as it appeared in very early childhood. All the puer's behaviors stem from the search for the recon- stellation of the childhood self. There are two broad areas which we can examine. One is the area of goals and achievements, and the other is the area of personal relationships, There are two sources then within this distinction which give rise to puer characteristics. Some puer characteristics in both areas are directly derivative of the states of the Self. Other charac- teristics are derivative of defenses against experiencing this cycle, because the cycle of fragmentation and inflation is extremely painful. As I will explain, both sides of it are painful, not just the depression. The consequences are that the individual will split the entire experience off from conscious- ness and achieve some kind of artificial sense of stability. There are, in fact, two different kinds of artificial stabi- lities, which I will discuss in a moment. A characteristic ~ feature of puer-puella psychology is the presence of intense, recurring fantasies of grandeur. These fantasies are the translation in consciousness of, and a way of defining identity based on the childhood self. Depending on the degree of the modification by experience, the fantasies correspond more orte tl cA RI 15 less to the pure archetype. The most common fantasies today can be placed on a sort of scale of decreasing grandeur. Importantly, the same archetype remains at the core of each, and that is the Self. These fantasies would be: (1) Messianic fantasies in which the personal identity is almost purely equivalent to the features of the Self; (2) fantasies of being spiritually chosen or of great spiritual accomplishment; (3) fantasies of being a genius or being gifted and especially creative; (4) the wish for great fame or power; (5) the wish for great wealth; (6) the desire for professional success. Keeping in mind that the core of all these fantasies remains the Self, we can see that as the pressure exerted by the child- hood Self decreases, and realistic capacities increase, a plane is reached where the fantasies become realistic, depending, of course, on the individual's actual talents. In the course of successful analysis the fantasies of grandeur will often follow just this descending pattern. It is important to realize that the fantasies of grandeur are not only stimulating and exciting, they are also a source of a great deal of pain. Because the fantasy is always something unattainable but the individual is unable to experience a sense of identity or wholeness from any- thing less, there is a constant sense of failure that accompanies every inflation of this sort. And furthermore, there is a great deal of pressure exerted on the individual from the fantasies themselves. An individual who is in an inflated state as a consequence of the constellation of the childhood self will experience himself under a tremendous pressure to constantly perform, because there is a necessity to live up to those fantasies and verify their truth. When the talents and capa- cities of such pueri or peulli are sufficient, they will frequently follow a meteoric rise in a profession that keeps them before the approving reflection of the public. Thus, there is a plethora today of stars and superstars, evidence of the des- perate scramble for fame, as if it were a pathway to salvation, and naturally we call it "becoming somebody." Another feature of puer and puella fantasies are dreams of flying or fantasies of flying These fantasies have often been taken simply as an expression of inflation. But I think there is something more specific that can be said about them. The essential meaning of this motif is as an intrapsychic represen- tation of the pressure, the specialness, and the grandeur exerted by the unmodified childhood self. In other words, when an individual is dreaming of flying, you can bet that he is ex- periencing in consciousness a tremendous amount of pressure to do something special. These dreams or the experience of being high in general is often interpreted as meaning that the indi- vidual is out of touch with reality, This interpretation is often correct but only secondarily if by reality we are referring16 to the outside world. Rather, the motif of being high or of flying represents the way in which the sense of specialness raises a person beyond his actual limitations. The age old dream of flying has always been the prototype for this urge to escape from mundane restraints. It is fitting, therefore, that the source of dreams like this are in fact the Self. To put it in a nutshell, flying dreams are a tip-off that the individual is in the midst of a disturbing and painful rela- tionship to the Self. ‘That is what needs to be looked for. Something which I am sure you have all noticed is that the motif of crashing is just as common in puer fantasy as that of flying.’ We can see immediately ‘thatWehe two. types of dreans represent the two poles of the states of the self, that of cohesion and that of fragmentation. Therapeutically it is extremely important that the individual learn to see that the two states condition one another, that there is in effect no flying without crashing and no crashing without flying, that it represents an alternating state of the Self within the individual, and that it is the same Self that is going through that process. If the individual can learn to see how the fantasies of flying and crashing are related to internal modifications in his sense of identity, eventually the cycle will be seen as just that. It will be seen as a cycle in its entirety, and the dreams will begin to change. 1 can give you one excellent example of that, where after a whole series of flying and crashing dreams, the individual finally realized that these dreams were referring to his state of identity and that he was liable to radical fluxuation. He dreamed: “I am lifted up by an enormous parachute-drop machine without a parachute. When it gets to the top it drops me and I crash to the earth. ‘There it picks me up again.” Here you can see how the person has experienced that he is subject beyond his will to an autonomous process in the psyche, a fragmentation and inflation. As a side issue, one of the elements in this dream is the fact that it is a machine that is doing the work.’ That is a very typical feature for puer and puella dreams, and similar motifs which appear are, for instance, elevator dreams, escalator dreams, dreams in which some mechanical apparatus is doing the elevation or the dropping. Something else which I have noticed that is also common in these dreams is that there is a sense of lack of control. One individual dreamed that his foot got caught in an escalatér, the escalator started dragging him up, then the escalator started getting steeper and steeper, and he could do nothing about it. It was a representation of the auto- nomous reconstellation of the childhood Self and the terrifying aspect of that experience. Similarly, people who have elevator dreams very commonly cannot get off at the floor they want. Probably the most common motif is "I wanted to go to the third floor, but the elevator took me to the fourth floor," or "I wasee ERT 17 in the elevator, and I pushed the down button, and the elevator went up," or "the elevator dropped to the ground." The essential features are the mechanicality of the procedure and the lack of control over it. There is a lot more material. I am clearly not going to be able to present it all. I hope I have given you enough of a skeleton to initiate discussion. I am going to talk about a few more things. I am going to concentrate on some of the defenses against the Self. I am also going.to make some comments about therapy. The whole detailed analysis ‘of how all the various puer charac- teristics derive from this model. I am not going to be able to go into it in the remaining time. Essentially there are two more bi es that are involved “dn the psychology of ‘the puer and puella. The states that I ‘am talking about here you will find observed and described in different language in psychoanalytic literature on narcissism. You will find many similarities between what I have presented so far, with the exception, of course, that the Self that the psychoanalysts conceptualize is not quite the same as the Jungian Self. It is an aspect of-it. I want to mention that the cycling back and forth of the Self has at its archetypal core the image of the savior god, of the dying and resurrecting god. Jungian theory has traditionally used the. image of Christ, for example, as a model of the individuating ego, a la Edinger. I think that that is a secondary consequence, and in fact the dying and resurrecting god images that are found all over the world are precisely expressions of the Self in its dynamic aspect. The cycle of death and resurrection is something which goes on internally all the time. Those mythologies that relate the image of the dying and resurrecting god to some other more permanent god, for instance, Christ and the Father, are repre~ sentation, in my opinion, of the two aspects of the Self: that aspect which we experience in cycle that has to do with our sense of our identity and that other aspect of the Self which is in a sense transcendental, which is permanent and stable, and which is in the background. Because both the state of inflation and the state of fragmenta- tion are painful, the state of fragmentation being painful because it is marked by an experience of being nothing, the state of inflation being painful because of the pressure that it exerts on the individual, a person who suffers from this cycling intensely over many years will develop defenses against having the experience all together. ‘There are two basic kinds of defenses. One of them is a defense against the state of fragmentation and the other is a defense against the state of inflation. ‘The defense against the state of inflation I call the senex defense. What it amounts to, in effect, is a splitting off from consciousness of the state of inflation. When the state18 of inflation gets close to consciousness, the individual who has erected a senex defense against it will begin attacking his own inflations in a very particular way, which I am sure you all recognize. It is a kind of cynical, superior, rigid, excessively adult attitude. Similarly, a person who suffers from that defense, because he has the inflation underneath, will project that inflation and will be extremely sensitive to pueri and their environment. Any time somebody else comes along who has the slightest smell of an inflation about them, they will immediately get all of the projected attack. You will hear phrases, not original ones but cliches: “Why don't - you grow up?", "It's time to face reality.", etc. The state of a senex defense is marked by an extreme rigidity of the personality, an incapacity to enjoy any kind of stimulation, ° and a philosophy (the cognitive aspect) which corresponds to the senex archetype as Hillman describes it. Emotionally there is a depressive atmosphere which is not really depression. It is the lack of connection ‘to the Self. There will be a philosophy of excessive adulthood. The other form of defense is a defense against the experience of fragmentation. This defense takes a different-form.* It is hot a splitting off of the éonstellated Self, because the Self is, in fact, not there. It is rather an attempt to com- Pensate for the sense of nothingness. This happens in a very particular way and is a style of defense which I think is extremely important for Jungians to be aware of in therapeutic work, because it leads to a great many therapeutic pitfalis. To go back to the state of fragmentation, and to make it very brief, the fragments of the Self are the archetypes. The functional unity which constitutes the Self is the functional unity of all the various archetypes. An individual who has experienced a fragmented Self will not experience the unity of all the various archetypal modalities that would otherwise be available to him. What he will do is to latch onto one of them. The reason for this is that each archetype has inherently a kind of stereotypic unity to it. Each archetype is in a way like a Dickens character, and there is a very intense stereotyped co- hesiveness of identity that each archetype or each god image represents. It is that sense of unity, that artificial sense of unity, the unity that belongs to each of the individual gods, that the individual will seek to identify with in order to com- pensate for the lack of the experience of the Self. This will happen, generally speaking, immediately after the Self has been fragmented, so that there is a dynamic sequence involved. The individual will experience a fragmentation of the Self either internally created or as the result of what he perceives as an external attack, and at that moment he will move into an iden- tification with one of the archetypes. Each archetype that is identified within this fashion has associated with it, particular1 \ i 7 ' xa 19 kinds of behavior, If we were to take the planetary gods as a kind of rough archetypal schema, an individual who identifies with Mercury, who has found over time that that is a satisfactory substitute, will, at the moment of attack, become hyper-intellectual and will’ use detached sophistry and intellectualization as a compensation. The individual who identifies with Venus will suddenly fall into compulsive sexuality. The individual who habitually identifies with Mars will have an attack of rage. I realize.I am making this very schematic and very simple, but I will let you fill in the details yourself. What you need to look for then is neither the behavior nor the archetype. The question “what's my myth,” which is becoming as much a cliche amongst Jungians as is "uh-huh" for éreudians and "I hear you” for Rogerians, would be at this point a mistake. The essential feature of the puer psychology is not the archetype that he chooses as a typical defensive maneuver. It is rather the fact of fragmentation that he is defending against and that he does not want to experience. If, for example, an individual appears in your office and he is into some kind of archetypal identification, and you send him packing off to the library looking up all kinds of amplications and investigating the archetype, he will simply develop a philosophy that supports his defense. He will avoid understanding what it was that triggered the identifica- tion in the first place. As a rule of thumb, when an individual comes in with an archetypal identification, some kind of shattering of the Self has preceded it. It might be judged by external standards a very trivial action that has initiated it. You might not have sufficiently complemented the analysard's painting. You might have looked at the clock in the previous hour five minutes before the hour was up, right when he was talking about the most important event in his life. Any little thing like that. It is essential, therapeuticly, to hunt back in the experience and find what it is that triggered it. at the moment that the person can acknowledge, "Yes, indeed, I was very, very hurt. I felt like I was nothing. It opened up the whole well of emptiness that I have suffered from all my life," the identification will disappear. The compulsive behavior, whatever it is, will be eliminated. One of the features of the compulsiveness of the behavior, or an important feature of the compulsiveness, stems from the fact that the various activities are what I would like to call "focusing" activities. Whenever you latch onto one particular archetype, which has behind it a particular instinct, the 11 stinctive arousal, for instance of sexuality, the instinctive arousal itself and the fact that you are on a track determined20 by instinctive arousal creates a sense of cohesiveness and focusing of the personality that compensates for the sense of fragmentation that you would otherwise experience. Indi- viduals who are involved in this will experience or will report that whenever, for instance, they become compulsively sexual, whenever they become compulsively angry, that there is a sense of abstraction in the experience. As an example let's say sexuality happens to be the chosen defensive maneuver. The individual will go out and seek numerous sexual liasons. They will report that there is not real emotional contact in their sexual experiences. You can see it represented very clearly by Annie Hall. Those of you who have seen the movie "Annie Hall" saw her represented as literally floating out of the bed like a ghost while her body was involved in the various bedroom activities. And, indeed, the individual is not res~ ponding to another. The individual is responding to an internal state, so that the partner will, of course, sense this distance and usually experience it as an attack on himself or herself. That is really a mistake because the person is not responding to the other person, they are responding to themselves. Another feature of the focusing activity chosen is that there is very rarely any kind of instinctive disturbance associated with it. A person will not choose sexuality as a maneuver and defense against fragmentation if they have sexual difficulties. I mean difficulties in just the physical act itself. An indi- vidual who has trouble with impotence is going to choose another activity as a focusing activity. It will not work if he chooses sexuality, and then he just gets another blow. Connected also with both styles of defense are typical psycho- somatic states. The senex defense against inflation is accom- panied by all the traditional pressure phenomena in psychoso- matic medicine. That is to say: high blood pressure, ulcers and all those things that have to do with pressure that has been internalized and somaticized. On the other hand, the individual who suffers or who defends himself against frag- mentation tends to suffer from hypochondria. Hypochondria is the expression projected onto the body of the fragmented Self and the focusing onto a single party In effect, what happens is that the individual, instead of being aware of his entire body in a more or less uniform fashion as a body image repre~ sentation of the Self, will experience no body image. In its place is a focusing on one single part. The connection between body parts and the various archetypes is very nicely represented in some pictures in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc du Barry, where you can see astrological man with the various body parts represented by the different astrological constellations. There are many other mystical texts which show much the same thing.a This has been a very schematic summary, and now I. just want to make a very few brief comments about therapy. The essential problem in therapy with pueri is that you do not know whether to. take a reductive or synthetic approach. And, in fact, until the puer problem is resolved, which is to say, until the rela- tionship to the Self is properly established, the style of analysis has to be very different and involves neither reduction or synthesis. With an individual who has a disturbed rela- tionship to the Self, who is still a puer in effect, reductive analysis tends to-initiate fragmentation. The person will not really hear the content of the reductive interpretation. They will instead experience it as an attack, as an intrusion, as a shattering of a delicately established balance, even if the interpretation is completely correct. On the other hand, synthetic interpretations, amplification and the classical style of syntheti¢ analysis, tends to initiate or to support the state of the childhood Self and to act, in effect, as a buffer against the frustration that they would otherwise have to experience.’ So you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don't. : : What is needed for a long period of time, therefore, is very close and delicate work on the relationship between the analysand and the analyst. What you need to do is cease looking at content, cease looking at reductive content about material from the past and cease looking at archetypal amplificatory content. The essential issue is to make the person aware of what he is doing in this schema. In other words, the person who is defensive needs to be helped slowly to see that each defensive maneuver, whether it be the sudden ironic jabs that they make at themselves when they are in a mode of senex defense or whether it be some compulsive focusing activity in which they have been habitually involved, is not primary and that it stems from some kind of either inflationary or depressive experience. That is the first step, Most effectively it involves discussing these things as they relate to you, the analyst. In other words, the analysand, is‘gding to react to your evéry move in some emotional way. to matter what you do, an emotional reaction is going to be present in.the analysand, and it is cxtremely important to learn to bring that out, to have the person be.clear about the emotional states that he is experiencing. Generally speaking, as a schema, they will fall into the framework above. The next stage is to allow the individual to see that the two states are not separate. Initially, they will be conceived of as completely separate states that have no relationship to one another. With time.the person will become avare that a cyclical process is at work. The theoretical explanation of why that approach works is that, in effect, the part of the analysand who observes that he is in state A now and in state B then and | EE22 that there is a connection between the two, is a part of the analysand which is not in the cycle. It is an observing, neutral, third point of view that remains outside of this cycle. With constant therapeutic work, the sense of identity eventually gets shifted from the cycles of the Self to his capacity of observing the Self accurately. In.other words, what you are doing as an analyst is inducing at a late stage of development the kind of introversion that failed to develop when he was young. He will now learn to turn inwards in an objective way. : In the ideal individual, the sense of identity is modified over time because of the frustrations of reality. The puer will never therapeutically become ideal in that sense. In other words, - there is no route, as far as my experience goes, for taking a puer individual, curing him, and having him become a so-called moral" individual. The puer will always be different in a very particular way. That difference stems from the fact that the nuclear core of the Self, which remains unconscious in the normal individual or in the ideal individual but which infuses all his activities with a sense of meaningfulness, is in the puer something which actually comes up into consciousness. The successfully “therapized" puer~-if I can coin a modernism--will- no longer be able to rest on an unconscious core.of stable identity. He will instead be an individual who no longer acquires a sense of personal identity from the vicissitudes of the Self. In other words, a therapeutic separation has occurred between the ego and the Self, and.a process of dis-identification from the whole cycle is what sets in. ‘The puer actually develops a kind of personality that is distinctly different from the normal course of development. Such an individual will very likely be attracted to introverted, therapeutic, and analytic endeavors, because the experience of observing the Self objectively is something which they will not only need to continue for the rest of their life for the purpose of maintaining stability, but also is, in fact, the therapeutic gift per excellenc Tt is what makes it possible for such an indixidual to know what is going on in thé other individual. They have been through it themselves, they recognize the problem and are capable, therefore, of a fine sensitivity to emotional states in the analysand. :