unconscious. For Jung, the hero’s failure to return to the everyday world would spell failure to resist the allure of the unconscious.
By contrast to Jung, Campbell seeks pure unconsciousness. Campbell’s hero never returns to the everyday world. He surrenders to the unconscious. Yet Campbell himself demands the hero’s return to the everyday world. How, then, can his hero really be rejecting it? The answer is that the world to which Campbell’s hero returns is the strange, new world, which turns out to pervade the everyday one. No separate everyday world exists. The everyday world and the new world are really one:
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The two worlds, the divine [i.e., new] and the human [i.e., everyday], can be pictured only as distinct from each other – different as life and death, as day and night. . . . Nevertheless . . . the two kingdoms are actually one.
(Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 217)
Like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, the hero need never have left home after all. Where Jung espouses balance between ego consciousness and the unconscious, Campbell espouses fusion. Combining a philosophical interpretation of hero myths with a psychological one, he takes all hero myths to be preaching mystical oneness.
Adonis
While Jung himself mentions Adonis only in passing, he does mention him as an instance of the archetype of the etemal child, or puer aeternus. That archetype Jung also discusses only in passing, though he does devote many pages to an allied archetype, the Great Mother. Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest disciples, wrote a book on the puer archetype, though she deals largely with cases other than that of Adonis.
From a Jungian point of view, the myth of Adonis functions not
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merely to present the archetype of the puer but also to assess it. The myth serves as a warning to those who identify themselves with the archetype. To live as a puer, the way Adonis does, is to live as a psychological infant and, ultimately, as a foetus. The life of a puer in myth invariably ends in premature death, which psychologically means the death of the ego and a return to the womb-like unconscious
– but not, as for post-Freudian Rank, to the actual womb.
As an archetype, the puer constitutes a side of one’s personality, which, as a side, must be accepted. A puer personality is one who simply goes too far: he makes the puer the whole of his personality. Unable to resist its spell, he surrenders himself to it, thereby abandoning his ego and reverting to sheer unconsciousness.
The reason a puer personality cannot resist the puer archetype is that he remains under the spell of the archetype of the Great Mother, who initially is identical with the unconscious as a whole. Unable to free himself from her, he never forges a strong, independent ego, without which he cannot in turn resist any smothering female he meets. His surrender to the puer archetype means his surrender to the Great Mother, to whom he yearns only to return. A puer ‘only lives on and through the mother and can strike no roots, so that he finds himself in a state of permanent incest’. Jung even calls him a mere ‘dream of the mother’, who eventually draws him back into herself.
Biologically, a puer can range in age from adolescence, the period of most dramatic expression, to middle or even old age. Psychologically, however, a puer is an infant. Where for Freud a person in the grip of an Oedipus Complex is psychologically fixated at three to five years of age, for Jung a puer is fixated at birth. Where an Oedipus Complex presupposes an independent ego ‘egotistically’ seeking to possess the mother for itself, a puer involves a tenuous ego seeking to surrender itself to the mother. A puer seeks not domination but absorption – and thereby reversion to the state prior even to birth.
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Myth
For Freud and for Rank, Freudian and post-Freudian alike, attachment to the mother at any stage means attachment to one’s actual mother or mother substitute. For Jung, attachment to the mother means attachment to the mother archetype, of which one’s actual mother or mother substitute is only a manifestation. Where for Freud a boy should free himself of his yearning, infantile or Oedipal, for his own mother, for Jung a boy should free himself of his inclination to identify himself with the mother archetype. For Freud, the failure to free oneself means eternal attachment to one’s own mother. For Jung, it means the restriction of one’s personality to the mother archetype within. Where for Freud the struggle for freedom is between one person and another – son and mother – for Jung it is between one part of a person and another – ego and unconscious, which, again, the mother archetype first symbolizes.
Because an archetype expresses itself only through symbols, never directly, the aspects of the mother archetype which a boy knows are only those filtered through his actual mother or mother substitute. A mother who refuses to let her son go limits him to only the smothering, negative side of the mother archetype. A mother who, however reluctantly, finally lets her child go opens him to the nurturing, positive side of the archetype. Initially, any child is reluctant to leave. A smothering mother, by revealing only the smothering side of the mother archetype, tempts him to stay. A nurturing mother, by revealing the nurturing side of the archetype as well, prods him to resist the temptation. In all its aspects the mother archetype, as an archetype, is inherited. One’s experience of mother figures determines only which aspects of the archetype are elicited. A boy who never experiences a nourishing mother figure will never develop that dimension of the archetype latent in him.
A puer may be either conscious or unconscious of his character. To be sure, even a conscious puer experiences alluring females as epiphanies of the Great Mother, but at least he recognizes that other males experience women differently – as possible mates. He simply takes for granted that mystical union alone is right for him. He is
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both aware and proud of his unconventionality. The best-known case of a conscious puer is Casanova.
An unconscious puer, by contrast, assumes that everyone else is like him. He assumes that all other males seek unity with women, for no other possible relationship exists. A spectacular example is Elvis Presley, a quintessential mamma’s boy who lived his last twenty years as a recluse in a womb-like, infantile world in which all of his wishes were immediately satisfied, yet who deemed himself entirely normal, in fact ‘all-American’.
A puer can thus be either an actual person or a symbol. Some famous historical pueri even become symbols themselves. While a historical puer is biologically an adult, a symbolic one may never grow up, and can thereby exemplify exactly the
eternally young life that actual puer personalities strive to emulate. The most celebrated symbolic pueri are Peter Pan and the Little Prince.
Just as a puer may be conscious or unconscious, so he may outwardly be adjusted or maladjusted. Outwardly, he may be settled in a marriage and a job, but he finds no satisfaction in them. Or he may be unsettled even outwardly, as in the cases of Don Juan and the eternal student.
The opposite of the puer archetype is that of the hero. The hero succeeds where the puer fails. In the first half of life an ego is heroic in managing to liberate itself from the unconscious and to establish itself in society. A hero manages to secure a fulfilling job and a mate. A puer fails to do either. In the second half of life a now independent ego is heroic in managing to break with society and to return to the unconscious without thereby falling back into it. Where a hero in the first half of life establishes himself in the conventions of society, a hero in the second half defies those conventions. But a hero is consciously defiant. A puer is only unconsciously so. Where a hero risks everything for whatever he has committed himself to, a puer
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has committed himself to nothing and so risks nothing. Where a real hero is like Daedalus, a puer is like his son Icarus. Because a puer is a failed hero in the first half of life, he is necessarily a failed hero in the second half as well. Indeed, for him there is no second half.
Adonis is a quintessential puer because he never marries, never works, and dies young. He simply never grows up. He must first break out of a tree in order to be born. In Ovid’s version his mother, transformed into the tree, is reluctant to let him out. Like any other mother, she may be overjoyed at his conception, but unlike normal mothers, she wants to hoard him. Adonis himself has to find an exit.
No sooner does Adonis emerge from the tree than, in Apollodorus’ version, Aphrodite thrusts him back – not, to be sure, into the tree but into a chest. She thereby undoes the birth that had proved so arduous. When Persephone, to whom Aphrodite has entrusted the chest without revealing its contents, opens it, she likewise falls in love with Adonis and refuses to return him. Each goddess, just like his mother, wants to possess him exclusively. Though Zeus’ decision leaves Adonis free for a third of the year, Adonis readily cedes his third to Aphrodite. Never, then, is he outside the custody of these archetypal mother figures.
Adonis is unable to resist the goddesses, but not because they arouse him sexually. He sees them not as irresistibly beautiful females but as his mother, with whom he seeks not intercourse but absorption. Between him and the goddesses there exists the primordial state of mystical oneness that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,
whom Jung often cites, calls participation mystique (see Chapter 1). Psychologically, Adonis is at exactly that stage of humanity which Lévy-Bruhl and, following him, Jung consider primitive. Oblivious to the difference between his life and anyone else’s, he is the most extreme kind of puer – an unconscious as well as outward one. Where Campbell would laud Adonis’ identification with the world as mystical, Jung condemns it as infantile.
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