50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus

though we are dealing with the figure of the puer aeternus who had
become inauspicious through "metamorphosis," or in other words had
shared the fate of the classical and the Germanic gods, who have all
become bugbears. The mystical character of the experience is also
confirmed in Part II of Goethe's Faust, where Faust himself is
transformed into a boy and admitted into the ''choir of blessed
youths," this being the "larval stage" of Doctor Marianus.2
I do not know whether Goethe was referring, with this peculiar idea,
to the cupids on antique grave-stones. It is not unthinkable. The
figure of the cucullatus points to the hooded, that is, the invisible
one, the genius of the departed, who reappears in the childlike
frolics of a new life, surrounded by the sea-forms of dolphins and
tritons. [If I may interrupt Jung's quotation, cucullatus means "one
who wears a hood," who has a coat with a hood, and I think it highly
symbolic that Jean Cocteau, who wore this sort of coat, thereby
instituted the fashion of youths wearing these hooded coats. They are
pueri aeterni and even wear that costume! I wonder what Cocteau knew
about that.] The sea is the favourite symbol for the unconscious, the
mother of all that lives. Just as the "child" is, in certain
circumstances (e.g., in the case of Hermes and the Dactyls), closely
related to the phallus, symbol of the begetter, so it comes up again
in the sepulchral phallus, symbol of a renewed begetting.3
The great problem with which we are confronted in this general
outline by Jung is the double aspect of the child archetype. Just as
in one way it means a renewal of life, spontaneity, and a new
possibility suddenly appearing within or without and changing the
whole life situation in a positive way, so also does the child-god
have a negative aspect, a destructive one; namely, where Jung alludes
to the apparitions of a "radiant boy" and says that this must have to
do with a pagan child-god who has been condemned to appear only in a
negative form. The negative child-god leads us into very deep waters,
but it is safe to say that whenever the child motif appears we are
almost always confronted with the following problem.
The child motif when it turns up represents a bit of spontaneity, and
the great problem—in each case an ethical individual one—is to decide
whether it is now
2 "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," The Archetypes of the
Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 268. [CW refers throughout to The
Collected Works of C.G. Jung]
3 Ibid., par. 298.
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an infantile shadow which has to be cut off and repressed, or
something creative moving toward a future possibility of life. The
child is always behind and ahead of us. Behind us, it is the
infantile shadow which must be sacrificed—that which always pulls us
backward into being infantile and dependent, lazy, playful, escaping
problems and responsibility and life. On the other hand, if the child
appears ahead of us, it means renewal, the possibility of eternal
youth, of spontaneity and of new possibilities—the life flow toward
the creative future. The great problem is always to make up one's
mind in each instance whether it is an infantile impulse which only
pulls backward, or an impulse which seems infantile to one's own
consciousness but which really should be accepted and lived because
it leads forward.
Sometimes the context of the dreams shows very clearly which is
meant. Let us say a puer aeternus type of man dreams about a little
boy; then we can tell from the story of the dream if the apparition
of the child has a fatal effect, in which case I treat it as the
infantile shadow still pulling backward. But if the same figure
appears positive, then you can say that it is something which looks