50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus
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person goes wrong, or dies as the result of a disease or an accident,<br />
and one concludes that this occurred because he did not realize his<br />
problem—that it is his fault that he has this fate—that I consider<br />
disgusting. One has not the right to decide that.<br />
Page 37<br />
Nature has her own revenge. If an individual cannot solve his<br />
problems, he generally gets horribly punished with hellish diseases<br />
or accidents and it is not the business of others to point that out<br />
and make it a moral issue. There I think one should stop short and<br />
take the other hypothesis—that the person could not do it, that the<br />
structure was defective and therefore it was not possible. However,<br />
as long as the catastrophe has not taken place, it is better to take<br />
the other attitude, to try to create a hopeful atmosphere and believe<br />
in the possibility of a certain amount of free will, because<br />
empirically there are many cases where suddenly people can make up<br />
their minds to fight their neurosis and can pull out. Then you can<br />
call it a miracle or that person's good deed, whichever you like, but<br />
it is also that which in theology is spoken of as an act of grace. Is<br />
it your good deeds which lead to salvation, or is it the grace of<br />
God? In my experience you can only stay in the contradiction and<br />
stick to the paradox. We are confronted with that problem in a<br />
specific form here because throughout the story there is this tragic<br />
question in our minds. Something is constantly going wrong through<br />
the book and one does not know whether it is Saint-Exupéry's fault or<br />
whether he could not help it. Was there some reason from the very<br />
beginning which prevented him from solving his problem?<br />
Remark: But Jung says that there is no sickness in the collective<br />
unconscious and so, as the Self is an archetype, it does not seem to<br />
me that there can be anything defective.<br />
I quite agree. I think that if it appears defective, it is because of<br />
the wrong ego attitude. Objectively, in itself, it cannot be<br />
defective, which is why I cannot accept the idea of the defective<br />
Self. If the ego is able to change, something else changes; if the<br />
ego-attitude changes, then the symbols of the Self become more<br />
positive. That is something we experience again and again. If the<br />
person can achieve a certain amount of insight, then the whole<br />
unconscious constellation changes. But my philosophical adversaries<br />
would say that the fact that one man can change and the other cannot<br />
is due to the Self—and then one walks in a circle.<br />
In this specific story I shall therefore try to interpret the child<br />
figure in a double way—as the infantile shadow and the Self. Then we<br />
will try to find out which is which. That means we shall interpret<br />
all the material on a double rail and so try to find out more about<br />
this problem. The thesis that the star child whom Saint-Exupéry meets<br />
is the infantile shadow can very easily be proved, since he is the<br />
only one who understands the story of the boa constrictor and the<br />
elephant. That<br />
Page 38<br />
is a remnant of childhood, and we have a letter from Saint-Exupéry to<br />
his mother written in 1935, shortly before his death, where he says<br />
that the only refreshing source he finds is in certain memories of<br />
his childhood, for instance, the smell of the Christmas candles. His<br />
soul nowadays is completely dried up and he is dying of thirst. There<br />
is his nostalgia for his childhood, and one can say that the little<br />
prince represents this world of childhood and therefore is the<br />
infantile shadow. It is typical that he writes like that to his<br />
mother; one really sees that he is still involved in his mother<br />
complex. On the other hand, it can be said that the fact that this<br />
child appears on earth is not only negative. It is not the apparition<br />
of just the infantile shadow, because, as we shall hear later, the<br />
little prince comes down from a star, so one could say that an<br />
interesting parallel has taken place. Saint-Exupéry crashed, and from