50321190-39264356-Von-Franz-Puer-Aeternus

experienced with another woman. That would make her a rival of the
mother, and therefore sexual needs are satisfied only with a member
of the same sex. Generally such men lack masculinity and seek that in
the partner.
In Don Juanism there is another typical form of this same
disturbance. In this case, the image of the mother—the image of the
perfect woman who will give everything to a man and who is without
any shortcomings—is sought in every woman. He is looking for a mother
goddess, so that each time he is fascinated by a woman he has later
to discover that she is an ordinary human being. Once he has been
intimate with her the whole fascination vanishes and he turns away
disappointed, only to project the image anew onto one woman after
another. He eternally longs for the maternal woman who will enfold
him in her arms and satisfy his every need. This is often accompanied
by the romantic attitude of the adolescent. Generally great
difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social
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situation and, in some cases, there is a kind of false individualism,
namely that, being something special, one has no need to adapt, for
that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on. In
addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to
both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority. Such
people also usually have great difficulty in finding the right kind
of job, for whatever they find is never quite right or quite what
they wanted. There is always "a hair in the soup." The woman also is
never quite the right woman: she is nice as a girlfriend, but—. There
is always a "but" which prevents marriage or any kind of definite
commitment.
This all leads to a form of neurosis which H.G. Baynes has described
as the "provisional life," that is, the strange attitude and feeling
that one is not yet in real life.1 For the time being one is doing
this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what
is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in
the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is
prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the
moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a
savior complex, or a Messiah complex, with the secret thought that
one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in
philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will
be found. This can go so far as to be a typical pathological
megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that
one's time "has not yet come." The one thing dreaded throughout by
such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a
terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time
completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There
is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may
be impossible to slip out again. Every just-so situation is hell. At
the same time, there is a highly symbolic fascination for dangerous
sports—particularly flying and mountaineering—so as to get as high as
possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from the
earth, from ordinary life. If this type of complex is very
pronounced, many such men die young in airplane crashes and
mountaineering accidents.
They generally do not like sports which require patience and long
training, for the puer aeternus, in the negative sense of the word,
is usually very impatient by disposition, so that such sports do not
appeal to them. I know a young man, a classical example of the puer
aeternus, who did a tremendous amount of
1 See "The Provisional Life," in Analytical Psychology and the
English Mind.
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