Deepening Puer Spirituality
Excerpt-Thomas Moore-Care of the Soul
In our reflections on narcissism we had the opportunity to look at the attitude and point of view that Jungian and archetypal psychology call puer. Puer is the face of the soul that is boyish, spirited in a way that is perfectly depicted in the image of a male child or young man. But the attitude of the puer is not limited to actual boys, to males, to any age group, or even to people. A thing can havea puer quality, such as a house that is built more for its narcissistic self-image than for comfort or practicality. Because the puer attitude is so unattached to things worldly, it isn’t surprising to find it prevalent in religion and in the spiritual life. For example, there is the story of Icarus. Icarus was the young man who, escaping the labyrinth, put on waxen wings made by his father Daedalus, then flew (despite his father’s warnings) too close to the sun and fell tragically to earth.
One way to understand this story is to see it as the puer putting on the wings of spirit and becoming birdlike as a way of getting out of labyrinthine life. His escape is excessive, exceeding the range of the human realm, and so the sun sends him plummeting to his death. The story is an image of spirituality carried out in the puer mode. Anyone can turn to religion or spiritual practice as a way out of the twists and turns of ordinary living. We feel the confinement, the humdrum of the everyday, and we hope for a way to transcend it all. I know, from having lived the monastic life myself, how exhilarating that sense of rising above ordinary life can be, with its feelings of purity and unfetteredness; there are moments when I still long for it. remember also that when I was leaving that life to enter the world for the first time in many years, a friend who was happily married with two children came to try to talk me into staying. It was obvious that he wanted some of that open sky for himself, some relief from the confinements of family life. He couldn’t understand how I could let it go. “You’re completely free,” he said. “No one depends on you.”
The vertical movement of the spiritual life is not only freeing, it’s also inspiring and, of course, inflating. The feeling of superiority it gives seems worth most of the worldly deprivations required. But the puer spirit, so charged with the desire to flee the complexity of the labyrinth, can melt in the heat of its own transcendence. What can only be called a “spiritual neurosis” may develop. I have seen dedicated young men carry self-deprivation too far, suffering the Icarian crash in depressions and obsessions clearly tied to their spiritual aspirations. Some spiritual people effectively leave worldliness behind them, but for others there are dangers in those rarified airs of spirit. It isn’t easy for the high-flying puer to remain tethered to soul.