50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus

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