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It is by no means surprising that our culture is suffering from a problem of arrested

development. Not only the adolescents but the adults, who “oppressed by the images of beauty”

chase an image of their younger selves to the grave. The essays compiled by Mahdi (1987)

locate many of the social issues our culture is facing today in individuals hungering for ritual

processes and initiations, lacking the proper container. Amongst others, cutting (scarification),

anorexia (fasting), and compulsive violence are just a few examples of the terror which ensues

when human beings neglect their psychospiritual hygiene. For the discussion today I would like

to focus attention on the destructive lack-of-action in young men who live their lives either

pathologically bored or vicariously through their screens, indulging limitlessly in video games,

pornography, and identified with what I call the “persona’s persona”, the online self.

Many of the popular theories on arrested development argue an external etiology

(Henderson, 2005). The idea being, the ego as, it goes through its life, inevitably collides with

certain factors that can debilitate it. This ranges from momentary frustration to persistent moods

and states of possession lasting weeks, months, and in many cases, years. Our culture of

scientism reinforces determining a root cause, but as Wilber (2000) has shown, this rule is

applied solely to the third-person, external world, while overlooking subjective factors like

mental states and stages of development. Even mental states, he illumines, never survive for

long before getting externalized, regurgitated to graphs and charts, explained as byproducts of

mechanical processes in the brain or body. What is so perplexing about human psychology is the

variance we can observe between individuals who respond differently to the same event. Let us

remember those remarkable individuals, such as prisoners of war or survivors of the camps,

individuals who have endured unfathomable cruelty, and not only survived, but in many ways
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began truly living. And then of course, there are those well-to-do suburbanites with exceptional

educations who are privileged enough to truly tune in and discover their vocation without the

threat of eviction, who are at the same time burdened with an ungovernable depression and

despair. This area deserves more attention, as the wealthy elite are accursed with receiving the

culture’s misguided projection that wealth is a panacea to suffering. Growing up in one of the

most affluent zip-codes on planet earth, I can say that the neuroses which possess the rich are

some of the most incipient and destructive I have ever come across. And because these

individuals make up the 1%, only 1% of psychiatrists, doctors, lawyers, and educators know

what they are actually talking about.

It was Jung (1969) who argued that arrested development is not only the result of past

traumas but is influenced just as much by the inability to move forward in the present. There

exist within the psyche autonomous factors that are stronger than the ego that can retard its

development. These complexes are organizational structures of the personal unconscious and

“are not subject to our control but obey their own laws” (p. 228). Complexes are essentially

little, sub-personalities existing within the psyche. They are clusters of emotional energy,

centered around an archetypal core of meaning that can conflict with the ego. Jacobi (2020)

emphasizes further writing, “a complex that has become autonomous can carry on a totally

separate existence in the background of the psyche” (p. 12). Because these complexes are

unconscious, they get projected onto external objects in the environment, persuading the

individual the source and solution to the problem lies out there when it is happening subjectively.

The extent to which projections accurately correspond to those outer objects is ambiguous. This

is why Von Franz (1980) advocates for investigating the root source of a complex on subjective

and objective levels. More often than not, the objects which receive the projections do so
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because they possess a “hook” that one can conveniently “hang” the projection on just like a coat

is hung on a coat-hook.

It is not necessarily the complex that is problematic. Complexes are neutral (Jacobi,

2020), but are colored by the ego’s attitude toward them. In other words, the negativity or

positivity of the complex reflects the individual’s attitude towards the unconscious in general.

The suffering one experiences is often a tell that one is either resisting or misinterpreting their

true nature. Concerning arrested development, Henderson (2005) identifies how the ego is apt

to recoil in the face of the complex, thereby shirking the responsibility of finding an adaptive

attitude to move beyond its fixation.

The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

The puer can be a ferocious complex. Von Franz (1971) in The Problem of the Puer

Aeternus articulates the dominating patterns of what is known as the puer personality. She

writes, “In general, the man who identified with the archetype of the puer aeternus remains too

long in adolescent psychology; that is, all those characteristics that are normal in youth of 17 or

18 are continued into later life, coupled in the most cases with too great a dependence on the

mother” (p. 1). Commonly, this tends to display itself in various forms of what is known as Don-

Juanism, an analytic term used to describe the behaviors of a man who seeks in every woman the

ideal image of the mother, a perfect woman who will relieve him of any sense of duty or moral

responsibility. Soon after coupling, these individuals will experience a moment when their

partners’ humanity shines through the ideal image, and feel utterly devastated—devastated that

reality, once again, could not meet their expectations. Because these individuals tend to be the

passive-dependent types, they cannot terminate relationships respectfully. Excommunicating

their partners or blaming the break on the “hunger of their souls” is the most available option.
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These men are romantics, sentimentalists, dreamers and poets—but not men of action. They

speak like troubadours but say nothing. They believe themselves to be undiscovered geniuses

that hold the “secrets” to the universe if only the world would wise up and listen to them. The

cultural term “ghosting” is extremely relevant here, for the actual impact puer aeterni leave on

the world are inexistent. Their promises and aspirations vanish without a trace when life

becomes all too real.

The Don Juan refers to much more than just a large, sexual appetite and a poorly-

developed eros. It encompasses a main theme which is this dynamic of running and escaping

from one’s responsibilities and duties in favor of pleasure and excitement. In our culture, it is

even desired. The puer aeternus is an archetypal image, meaning, it has its roots in the collective

unconscious and appears in various forms throughout history. From the child-god of antiquity, to

Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, and TV icons like Hank Moody and Vincent Chase, the image is

eternal, changing only in the modern garb it dresses itself with to enter appropriately into the

culture. The puer is a romantic figure, but ever since the explosion of the online world it has

been romanticized beyond the usual. Though it is often the case the individuals who are eclipsed

by the puer cannot exercise any amount of volition at all, and as a result are bound to the reigns

of the complex. In an attempt to regain some semblance of control, the ego identifies with one

side of the spectrum and projects its opposite onto the environment (Perry, 1970).

Moore and Gillette (1990) have further developed this model by describing how these

unconscious spectrums lie along a gradient of active and passive poles—active in the sense of

identification, passive in the sense of projection. The former results when the ego gets

assimilated by the material that in ordinary, adaptive circumstances it would constructively relate

to. The puer then is being dominated by the “provisional life”, the “…strange attitude and
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feeling that his job, career, city, car, creative endeavor, or woman is not yet what is really wanted,

and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about” (von

Franz, 1971, p. 7). Likewise, this pattern often produces triadic relationships where a man can

be emotionally married to his spouse but only sexually viable with his mistress, as was the case

with a fellow I once knew who was so heavily dominated by these dynamics that he, even while

stricken with testicular cancer reflected less on impending death than on how anyone would

possibly date him with one testicle. This is more about a split-anima than anything else, which I

unfortunately do not have the time to explain today.

All of the milestones that should be achieved within the first half of life are abdicated

under the spell that these were all the wrong fits and something truer awaits. If a puer should be

born into affluence and have access to the finances, he might forever evade enduring the

frustrations of sticking to a path and adapting to the measures, for he can easily buy his way out.

This produces a subliminal sense of weakness and inferiority that are then further misinterpreted

as evidence he should be doing something different, else he would not have to feel the damnable

feelings of the flesh. Their fantasies of enlightenment or self-realization often have no authentic,

spiritual aim of bettering the world or geared towards that appointment with the Self, but are

used as defenses against the inescapable suffering of being a human being. 


The Influence of Parental Complexes

Jung (1972) believed that what Jungians describe as the “parental complex” was a

derivative of the same energies archaic societies related to the governing spirits and forces of the

culture. These were authoritative energies of tremendous power that shaped and moulded the

behaviors and attitudes of the culture. Despite the difference in differentiation, Jung believed
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these same factors still influence us unconsciously, not attached through the ancestral spirits our

own parents.

Perry (1970) describes how the child is influenced less by the conscious actions of his or

her parents than by their unconscious life. It is less about what they did than what they did not

do, or believe they did or did not do. It runs counter to the influence from the Freudian schools

who attempted to trace all neurosis and trauma back to the personal mother. The parental

complex is a chain of associations and unconscious energies constructed in part by the biological

parents and the pre-conscious patterns of the archetypal father and mother. Jung (ibid) believed

the real parents were only partially responsible for the lack of development or maladaptive

development in the kids. Since children develop from the unconscious matrix of the parents,

men can benefit greatly by investigating the ways their own relating functions are influenced by

the father’s anima, rather than just the personal mother. The same rule applies for the mother’s

animus, rather than just the personal father.

Von Franz (1971) observes that puers are often men who had too close a relationship with

their mother. Mothers who, lacking fulfillment in their marriages, reach towards their sons to

provide that missing link. This results in feelings of entrapment or icky sexual spillover that the

puer is always in one way or another evading. Likewise, it is largely influenced by a culture that,

having abandoned the traditional rites of passage, have no means of emancipating the son from

the world of the other mother and bringing them into the realm of the father. The profound

loneliness of men resulting from an inner severance with their instinctual life and a lack of male

community, produce castrated fathers that sons look upon with tragic disappointment. Their own

abdication, burn out, and lack of joie de vivre live on in the minds of their sons as negative

images of the senex. This is why the puer judges men with careers as sellouts or squares. The
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thought of resigning life over to habit and routine with no overt meaning makes it impossible to

leave the provisional life behind. It is true that their passive-dependent personalities contribute

to expectations that the world should be delivered to them on a silver platter, so independence is

never consciously fought for. What is interesting is how these men are rarely stupid buffoons.

They are often brilliant, voracious readers, and even profess great enthusiasm to become

extraordinary well beyond their peers. The incongruence between what they desire and what

they do suggest they are under the dominance of unconscious complexes. In my opinion, they

are more often than not the victims to a misguided view of complexes. It is misguided in that it

sees discomfort associated with complexes as causal instead of teleological, directed towards

some greater purpose. Shalit (2002) describes it as follows:

The archetype does not determines one's life course , and the actual experience is not

shaped by a predetermined mold. To this end we need complexes, for they are the path

and the vessel that give human shape and structure to archetypical patterns as they unfold

and personal experience. The complexes provide the link between the archetype and ego,

enabling the transformation of the archetypical into the personal (p. 25).

I disagree however in the sense that, for as long as we remain unconsciously alienated from or

identified with an archetypal pattern, our lives are not our own bit merely at the disposal of

whichever collectively conditioned factor has us in its clutches.

I want to describe in greater detail some of the context behind what I presume to be the

unwillingness to leave childhood. It is inaccurate to describe the process by which one sheds the

negative clasp of the puer and enters more fully into their life as “treatment”, because even the

negative manifestations of the puer are archetypal patterned and therefore purposive is

understood. Differentiation may be a better term, for it places the necessity of adaption above
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treatment in the psychiatric sense. Nonetheless, the individual needs to place psychological

boundaries around his fantastical impulses and enter into a life more in harmony with the body

and the physical earth. This is a difficult but not an impossible task, especially since the

imagination is where the puer feels safest. Unless of course, he has entered into a period of life

whereby his unconscious is demanding greater growth and development and produces disturbing

images of pain and suffering in an attempt to force him out of his head and into the world.

Von Franz (1971), describes how the pseudo-philosophical intellectualism of the puer is

often used as a defense against the dominance of the mother, although the same can be said for

the Father who abuses his power.

It is probably a last attempt on the part of the men to save their masculinity. That simply

means that certain young men who are overpowered by their mother escape into the

realm of the intellect because there the mother, especially if she is the earth type and a

stupid animus kind of woman, is not up to it. They can slip out from under her skirts into

the realm of the intellect, where she cannot follow (p. 178).

In order to save their masculinity and avoid being castrated, these young men will play off the

underdeveloped animus of their mother and construct mental barriers that presumably she cannot

invade. Or they are overcome by a blind rage, after having their undeveloped masculinity

threatened and perceive the slightest movement towards invasion. By submersing oneself in the

realm of the imagination, the felt-sense of the physical environment becomes dulled down to a

tolerable intensity. This creates a sense of psychological distance. They have, psychologically

speaking, “gone fishing.” This explains the often perceived sense of entitlement that

accompanies these dynamics , for it is just this tough, impenetrable shell of entitlement that

protects the vulnerability of the traumatized individual (Kalsched, 2014).

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Edinger (2017) describes how the ego develops through a series of stages over the course

of life as it differentiates from the original unconscious. The process of individuation is a grand

rite of passage from one stage to the next. The beginnings of this process have their origins in

the separation of the ego from the unconscious, which are reflected outwardly in child’s need to

psychologically differentiate from the fusion between his parents. Common parlance refers to

this state of psychological fusion as co-dependency. At the root is what Levy-Bruhl termed

participation mystique, an undifferentiated merger between the inner and outer world. Perry

(1970) further writes

In the matter of genesis, we are in the habit, for example, of looking to the mother as the

source of influence…but the child’s emotional psyche is not affected by these ego-

personalities of the parents anywhere near as much as by the unconscious components in

the parents…the genesis of complexes takes place at the level of the non-ego of the child

and the non-ego of the parents…in relation to these figures the child is apt to slip into

affect-ego positions and respond with his own complexes in emotional interactions…

[these products], bearing the imprint of the non-ego and subliminal aspects of the

personalities …arise out of affect-objects, not true objects (p. 10).

The author is describing in part what Hillman calls the “parental fallacy”, the belief we are who

we are due to the interactions with our parents. I quote him at great length here because he

locates what is so often missed in the conventional intervention of this insidious, codependent

style of relating between parents and their children. Both authors convey how the biological

mother becomes psychologically inflected and turned into a mythic caricature, and open the

dialogue towards the puer’s recovery. Hollis (1994), articulates this concept simply writing,

“The child’s experience of the mother is internalized as a complex; an emotionally charged

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cluster of energy beyond the control of the ego” (p. 109). It is exactly this fear of abandonment

that needs to be risked in order to achieve psychological separation. If mother and son fail to do

so, they will forever be wrapped around each other’s thumbs, pulling at the same, unconscious

thread. All of the conscious intentions to show care and support from the mother, and all of the

failed attempts made by the child in rebellion to establish distance, will unconsciously secure

their shared bondage or be used to validate the unconscious complex. Jung (1979) writes

“Behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other betray life”

(p. 20).

The Road to Recovery

The puer must head directly into his fear of parental abandonment in order to claim his

individual life. If he is in a relationship, he may have to symbolically divorce his spouse who

has been contaminated with the mother-imago. The visions of goddesses and seductresses that

flood his loins can be understood as faces of the anima coming to rescue him from the clutches of

the maternal unconscious. This fear is none other than the fear of differentiating from the pull of

his own unconscious inclinations to avoid his own self-realization. His commitment, quite

literally to anything other than his mother and his unconscious temptations to return to the

womb, is antidotal. Sometimes this happens in spite of oneself. I like to say that I was “duped”

into love. I really got to know my partner intimately after the lockdown was ordered for Covid.

She and I were forced to live under the same roof for nearly half a year. At that point, you either

fall in love or kill each other. I think this is what we mean by “falling” into love, as if we

tripped, and what Leonard Cohen meant when he sung:

I'm turning tricks, I'm getting fixed


I'm back on boogie street


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You lose your grip and then you slip


Into the masterpiece


And maybe I had miles to drive


And promises to keep


You ditch it all to stay alive


A thousand kisses deep

But, because I was still gripped by a negative mother-imago which attached itself to Thea, I had

to figure out a way to leave Thea without actually leaving her. I knew if I did I would be

recreating a pattern, chasing a glow that would vanish once the relationship became intimate. All

of the women that originally posed a threat of destroying my relationship, I related to

symbolically. By visualizing them and letting them carry me away and into bed, I felt as if I was

being rescued from entrapment and a devouring pull.

Again von Franz (1971) argues that the antidote par excellence for the puer’s recovery is

to develop his masculinity. If he does not, he will slowly but surely be defeated by his own

antagonism towards himself, as his innocent and pure demeanor get replaced by “the cold

gangster shadow without any human relatedness” (p. 47). An attempt to intercept the growing

number of puer aeterni was made by the mythopoetic men’s movement, led by Robert Bly,

Michael Meade, and James Hillman. Tacey (2014), quoting Bly, states that “what men really

want” (p. 497) is to rediscover their masculine spirit by getting initiated into the world of the

father. It seemed pre-modern societies had a better grasp on how to grow boys into men without

collapsing into the sadistic, shadow warrior tendencies that have been behind most of the culture

wars since the earliest beginnings of human culture. I have written about rites of passage and

ritual processes elsewhere, so I not recapitulate for the sake of time. But I would like to mention
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that the archetype of initiation follows a series of stages beginning with a separation from the

ordinary world, the mother’s world, and concluding in the same world not before the individual

has undergone a renewal of spirit. Eliade (1959), outlines for traditional cultures living from

within a mythic framework, these rituals served not only to accelerate the growth and

development of the initiates but that reenactment in itself, served a cosmological renewal. Ellen-

Harrison (1991) also makes the astute observation that initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries were

ultimately initiated into a broadened plane of consciousness that was prior unavailable to the rite.

The problem comes to a head in a culture of absent fathers. Not just the biological father, but the

archetypal father and the image of the senex.

When the father is absent, we fall more readily into the arms of the mother. And indeed

the father is missing; God is dead. the missing father is not your or my personal father.

He is the absent father of our culture, the viable senex who provides not daily bread but

spirit through meaning an order (Hillman, 1973, p. 83).

Moore (1990) couches the image of the father under the archetype of the King, the primary

mechanism of order, stewardship, and meaning in the psyche. As I have already mentioned, puer

aeterni have terrible father complexes. They are terrible and destructive in that they are

inexistent. The history of America is a kingless one. Our culture was founded on rebelling

against the King who misused power. From Caligula to Castro, so many of our images of Kings

are negative. Moore (cite) asserts accompanying the blessing of the father is a bottomless,

unconscious affirmation of care and support. Ultimately, what is being transmitted is the image

of the good-enough father, or the Good King, where it goes onto exist in the psyche of the son.

The vacuum where it is absent is replaced by images of shadow kings who either abdicate their

power or use it to manipulate others. Jung (1951) states that through consciously embracing
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individuation, the child can reconcile this inner want. “If he voluntarily takes the burden of

completeness on himself, he need not find it ‘happening ‘to him against his will in a negative

form” (p. 125). Until we replace our desire to punish or rebel against the wrongdoings of our

parents with the desire for completeness and our individuality, we will always be our own worst

enemy.

I myself operate an organic, therapeutic farm on the outskirts of Chicago , dedicated to

helping the youth discover their own potential. It is approached in support of the original vision

of Jung who understood where individuation is concerned, healing is an unfit term. It implies

stasis. All one can do is seek a symbolic interpretation of their unconscious material that will

“dream the dream onwards” and cut them loose from the stagnancy they already find themselves

in. The cathexis of energy lying at the core of the complex must be discharged and integrated in

order to free up valuable psychic energy that could be used for betterment, rather than binding

one to the pain and discomfort of an outgrown mode of living.


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