50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus

fantasy comes into the memory of the real life, namely, the hopeless
and impossible situation which in all myths and fairy tales, as you
know, is the beginning situation where supernatural beings appear. In
many fairy tales a man gets lost in the woods and then finds a little
dwarf, and so on. It is typical that when someone is lost in the
woods or on the sea, something numinous appears. It shows the
psychologically typical situation where the conscious personality has
come to the end of its wits and does not know how to go on any more.
One feels completely disoriented, with neither goal nor outlook in
life. In those moments, energy, blocked from a further flow into
life, piles up and generally constellates something from the
unconscious, which is why this is the moment of supernatural
apparitions such as we have here.
It often happens even in concrete situations that people have
hallucinations of some kind if the conflict and the blockage go far
enough. On a minor scale, the dream life becomes highly activated and
people are forced into paying attention to it, and then come the
apparitions within the dreams. Generally that happens when the
previous form of life has broken down. When he had this crash with
his mechanic, Saint-Exupéry was already in the crisis of this life.
He was in his thirties, and his flying was no longer satisfactory,
but he could not switch over to any other occupation. He already had
these spells of irritability and nervousness and broke through them
by taking on another flying job. Originally for him flying had been a
real vocation, but slowly it became an escape from something new to
which he did not know how to adapt. Very often one chooses some
activity in life which for the time being is absolutely right and
could not be called an escape from life, but then suddenly the water
of life recedes from it
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and slowly one feels that the libido wants to be reoriented to
another goal. One perseveres in the old activity because one cannot
change to the new one, and in such situations perseverance in the old
activity means regression, or flight—and escape from one's own inner
feeling, which says that one should now change to something else.
Because one does not know how, nor wants, to go in a different
direction, one perseveres. When Saint-Exupéry had his airplane crash,
he was already beginning to enter the crisis stage of his aviator's
life. Here the apparition shows what is meant.
There is a marked parallel to the meeting of the star prince in
Islamic tradition. I think it is even possible that, having lived so
long in the Sahara and having made friends with a number of Bedouins,
Saint-Exupéry might have heard about it. In the 18th Sutra of the
Koran there is the famous story, which Jung has interpreted in
detail, of Moses in the desert with his servant Joseph, the son of
Nun, who is carrying a basket with a fish in it for their meal. At a
certain place the fish disappears, and Moses says that they will stay
there because something will happen, and suddenly Khidr appears.
(Khidr means "the verdant one.") He is supposed to be the first angel
or the first servant of Allah. He is a kind of immortal companion who
then goes along with Moses for some time, but tells him that he
(Moses) will not be able to stand him and will doubt his deeds. Moses
assures him that he will have enough confidence to go with him, but
he fails miserably.
Most of you know the story of how Khidr first comes to a little
village where there are boats on the water and of how he drills a
hole in each so that they sink, and Moses remonstrates, asking Khidr
how he could do such a thing. Khidr says that he had said that Moses
would not understand, but then he explains that robbers would have
stolen the boats and that by bringing about this minor calamity the
fishermen will be able to repair their boats and still have them,
whereas otherwise they would have been lost. So that really Khidr was
doing them a service, but Moses naturally being too stupid had not