Pothos: The Nostalgia of the Puer Eternus
Excerpt - Hillman
Turning now directly to our theme, we find that Jung describes the phenomenology of wandering and longing as follows: “The heroes are usually wanderers (Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Heracles, Mithras, etc.), and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the restless urge that never finds its object, of nostalgia for the lost mother.” The secret goal of wandering, said Jung in 1912, is the lost mother. There is a piece of libido, which he calls the renegade libido, that turns away from the heroic tasks and incestuously wishes to go back and down to mother. Blocked by the incest taboo, the libido never finds its goal and so wanders and longs eternally.
This dynamic explanation is the early and classical Jungian account of the puer aeternus: the eternally youthful component of each human psyche, man or woman, old or young, that is eternally wandering, eternally longing, and is ultimately attached to the archetypal mother.
We shall not, let me insist, be following this account. And one of our main deviations with the classical Jungian school is just here. For to place all the spiritual phenomenology of the puer eternus motif with the mother archetype is a psychological materialism: a view that attributes spirit to an appendage of maternal matter. To our archetypal view, puer eternus psychology—the wounded hands and feet and bleeding, the high flights and verticality, the aestheticism and amorality, the peculiar relation with Artemesian and Amazonian women, the timelessness that does not age, the penchant for failure, destruction, and collapse (la chute) [5]—all these events belong to a series of young godlike men or divine youths. These puer events pertain to the phenomenology of spirit. By not grasping this fact as it appears in young men and women today, and in the puer eternus figures in our dreams and fantasies, we miss the epiphanies of the spirit archetype, judging them as something “too young,” too weak, sick or wounded, or not yet grown up. Thus does the perspective of the mother archetype prevent the possibilities of spirit as it emerges in our lives. Therefore, we shall be especially wary of attributing wandering and nostalgia to the mother archetype.