The title puer aeternus therefore means eternal youth, but we also use it sometimes to indicate a certain type of young man who has an outstanding mother complex and who therefore behaves in certain types of ways which I would like to characterize as follows.
In general, the man who is identified with the archetype of the puer aeternus remains too long in adolescent psychology; that is, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen are continued into later life, coupled in most cases with too great a dependence on the mother.
…
This is often accompanied by the romantic attitude of the adolescent. Generally great difficulty is experienced in adapting to the social situation, and in some cases, there is a kind of false individualism, namely that, being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on. In addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to both an inferiority complex and feelings of superiority. Such people also usually have great difficulty in finding the right kind of job, for whatever they find is never quite right or quite white they wanted.
…
This all leads to a form of neurosis which H.G. Baynes has described as the “provisional life,” that is, the strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that thing, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about…With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior complex, or a Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found. This can go so far as to be a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one’s time “has not yet come.” The one thing dreaded throughout by such a typical man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again.
-Marie-Louise von Franz (1959)
That American society is experiencing an epidemic of protracted adolescence seems to be well enough accepted that proving it feels superfluous. The typical hallmarks of transition into adulthood (sexual debut, marriage, homeownership, career-building, etc.) are everywhere delayed when they are not simply absent.
Explanations cultural, economic, and even biological have been proffered but I would like to discuss a dimension not often discussed: psychological. The distinction between ‘biological’ and ‘psychological,’ like the distinctions between the other dimensions is obviously to some degree arbitrary. In drawing it I mean only to suggest that it is possibly to discuss the psychological dimension without constant recourse to biological explanations, although surely they are present. While behavioral genetics has given good reason to suppose that the contribution to variation in populations is largely captured by biological (genetic) determinants, where environmental influence appears most salient is where biology comes closest to psychology: in the life of the mind.
Recently I found myself in a thread on Twitter discussing, in the words of OP “whatever the fuck happened to fatherhood between 1920 and 1990”. While I’m not sure I agree with the importance attached to those dates, the general phenomenon he was alluding to is striking enough that out of all the replies, only a single one asked him to clarify what he meant. I offered a short-list of a few of the usual suspects: women gaining financial and reproductive independence has lessened their reliance on men for child-rearing, increased ease of divorce, which generally defaults to custody for the mother, and the positive feedback loop of fatherless boys becoming fathers to the next generation of fatherless boys.
This then sets the stage for a discussion of the mother complex. While it is quite possible, as we will see, for a boy with a present father to develop a mother complex and puer psychology, it is not hard to see how on aggregate, these factors could contribute to the problem.
The first thing to note is that no one is free from responsibility here. As Jung put it:
If this situation is dramatized, as the unconscious usually dramatizes it, then there appears before you on a psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding. Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing and marrying. You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.
Where does the guilt lie? With the mother, or with the son? Probably with both. The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously. There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift — from the mother. The fragment of the world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him halfway, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales. For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life. The mother, forseeing this danger, has carefully inculcated into him the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, loyalty, so as to protect him from the moral disruption which is the risk of every life adventure. He has learnt these lessons only too well, and remains true to his mother.
Erich Neumann, speaking of the guilt feelings of the young boy for ‘betraying’ his mother through maturation:
However, a normally developed child’s ego, reinforced by the security of the primal relationship, will be able to overcome such guilt feelings, especially if they are not strengthened by a clinging mother and if the child can rely on a father figure who supports it in its evolution towards independence and hence relative liberation from the mother…
…an abnormality toward excessive strength or weakness of the mother or father can exert a disturbing or pathogenic effect. Of course, (this) progression…is hampered by an overly strong mother in the same way as by an unusually weak father…
…Even though married to a normal father, an excessively strong, binding mother who dominates the family situation obviously inhibits progress just as much as a normal mother in the presence of an especially weak father (through no fault of her own and regardless of the causes). The absence of a father figure has a disruptive effect on the child’s ego-development regardless whether the cause of the absence lies in a weakness of character or an illness, whether he is drawn away by work or by an extramarital love affair, or whether he is “absent” due to war or death. The effect on the child is always negative since the species-specific familial situation is not fulfilled.
Neumann wrote this in 1953. To extrapolate the implications to today takes no great imaginative leap.
Finally, although I intend to keep the main thrust of this piece on masculine psychology, as I feel I understand it better, a passage from Anthony Stevens gives a hint as to what we may expect on the female side of things:
…(daughters of ‘devouring mothers’) tend to have problems in forming satisfactory heterosexual attachments. In particular, they are prone to develop a pattern of behaviour apparently the opposite of anxious attachment, namely, what Dr Colin Murray Parkes (1973) called, compulsive self-reliance. A woman living in accordance with this pattern eschews the whole minefield of affectional relationships, maintaining a detached, prickly independence, denying all need for love and support, and rigidly insisting on doing everything for herself, whatever the odds.
An important point to note here is that while on the individual level, these are decidedly moral problems, on the societal level, it makes a good deal of sense to view them as emergent. That is to say, while the responsibility of one’s development, to one’s family, and to one’s society is the individual’s alone, in order to glean insight about large-scale trends, it is often sufficient to notice the patterns objectively. The overpowering mother, the weak or absent father, the lazy and impotent man-child are in some sense well characterized as the result of cultural forces that placed increasing stress on individuals through the degradation of the traditional nuclear family. This is important because, having outlined the problem, I am now going to venture into the realm of remedy and while guilt and regret, when honest, can be a spur to growth, they can also act as a self-serving inhibition to it. Placing one’s experience in the context of larger, essentially autonomous factors can, if one is able to still accept personal responsibility, be a powerful counteractive measure against grandiose self-flagellation that would keep one stunted while secretly trying to win atonement the easy way.
Two truisms:
- While your wound is not your fault, it is your responsibility.
- The solution to your problem is generally the thing you would least like to do.
Part of the nature of protracted adolescence is that it is essentially a trauma. That is, its effects continue after its original cause has abated. It is true that the problem can compound itself (the NEET has more and more trouble escaping the gravity of mom’s basement the longer he remains there), but this need not be the case. The effects of a puer psychology can follow one out of the original family constellation, with disastrous consequences on the personal level and if common enough, on the societal level. On a personal level, the puer allergy to come down to earth and to commit oneself to living life often takes form symbolically: a flight “above it all” can be achieved a multitude of ways from drugs to a heady preoccupation with abstract philosophy that often betrays an immature, child-like emotional life. In extreme examples, this feeling function is projected onto women and alternatively feared and hated. On a societal level, his fancied (fanciful) uniqueness shields from him the extent to which he is susceptible to mass psychology, the consequences of which the 20th century supplies in abundance. Acknowledging both the potential permanence and consequences, a natural question is what options are open to one who is relatively conscious of his situation and desirous of change.
von Franz sums up Jung’s proposal:
In Symbols of Transformation Jung spoke of one cure: work, and having said that he hesitated for a minute and thought, “Is it really as simple as all that? Is that just the one cure? Can I put it that way?” But work is the one disagreeable word which no puer aeternus likes to hear, and Jung came to the conclusion that it was the right answer. My experience also has been that if a man pulls out of this kind of youthful neurosis, then it is through work.
She hastens to add, however that “the puer aeternus can work…when fascinated or in a state of great enthusiasm. Then he can work twenty-four hours at a stretch or even longer, until he breaks down, but what he cannot do is to work on a dreary, rainy morning when work is boring and one has to kick oneself into it; that is the one thing the puer aeternus usually cannot manage and will use any kind of excuse to avoid.”
Here we come to a major crux and one that highlights the particularly concerning positive feedback aspect. As the puer problem becomes more pronounced, the available channels for improving the situation increasingly seem to be closing. Young people are less and less interested in dating, prospective employers continue to ask for more while paying less, and buying a home is basically a pipe dream to a huge swath of the nation’s youth. We are both faced with an epidemic where realistic avenues for commitment, career, and community are urgently needed, and one in which they are in ever scarcer supply. What happens when a society’s youth lose all hope of growing up and taking part in life? We may be starting to find out.
