Hillman on the Puer

It is interesting that Hillman first began writing about the puer in 1967, when the puer Sixties spirit might have been at its peak. And he re-visioned some of the thinking about the puer, and saw legitimacy in some of the puer ambition. 'Without this archetypal component affecting our lives there would be no spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny' he said.

Hillman saw senex(old man) and puer(youth) as two primary modes of apprehending lived experience(and because Senex style systems, structures have tended to dominate our ways of seeing, he often came at it from the side of the puer). And in a way, he reminds us that we might need some of the puer spirit, both within ourselves and within our culture and society.

But for Hillman, in his approach, if the puer who loves the ‘heights’ and the ‘peaks’ of the spirit, can just ‘deepen’ a little, or grow down, or descend into the ‘depths’ of the ‘psyche’ or the soul, then it can bring more substance and ‘depth’ to the puer personality. If the puer spirit can just turn towards the soul, it is like a wedding of the spirit and the soul, for Hillman, and an accommodation between the high-driving spirit on the one hand, and the nymph of the valley, and the soul that loves ‘depth’, on the other.