The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

Marie-Louise von Franz

Notes on von Franz’s lectures on the puer aeternus: the adult who keeps life provisional, the fantasies that sustain it, and work as the way out.

Reading notes in Google Docs.

Marie-Louise von Franz was a Jungian analyst and a long-time collaborator of Jung, and the book is a series of lectures given at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. The puer aeternus, the eternal youth, is her name for the adult who stays adolescent: full of promise, and unwilling to accept the particular limited life in front of him. She reads the pattern through two literary texts, Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Bruno Goetz’s novel Das Reich ohne Raum.

Concepts

• The provisional life. The present arrangement is treated as temporary, with the real life due to start later. Nothing has to be committed to while that holds.
• Refusal of the ordinary. Ordinary work and ordinary limits read as a betrayal of something higher, which is how the pattern defends itself.
• The cure she names is work. Sustained, unglamorous work on something real, continued past the point where it stops being interesting.