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Puer aeternus

Puer aeternus (Latin for 'eternal boy'; female: puella aeterna; sometimes shortened to puer and puella) in mythology is a child-god who is eternally young.

In the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, the term is used to describe an older person whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level, which is also known as "Peter Pan syndrome", a more recent pop-psychology label. In Jung's conception, the puer typically leads a "provisional life" due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. The puer covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.

The phrase puer aeternus comes from Metamorphoses, an epic work by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – c. 17 AD) dealing with Greek and Roman myths. In the poem, Ovid addresses the child-god Iacchus as "puer aeternus" and praises him for his role in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Iacchus is later identified with the gods Dionysus and Eros.[citation needed]

The puer is a god of vegetation and resurrection; the god of divine youth, such as Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung developed a school of thought called analytical psychology, distinguishing it from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In analytical psychology (or "Jungian psychology"), the puer aeternus is an example of what Jung considered an archetype, one of the "primordial, structural elements of the human psyche".

The shadow of the puer is the senex (Latin for 'old man'), associated with the god Apollo—disciplined, controlled, responsible, rational, ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication, whimsy.

Like all archetypes, the puer is bipolar, exhibiting both a "positive" and a "negative" aspect. The "positive" side of the puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future. He also foreshadows the hero that he sometimes becomes (for example, Heracles). The "negative" side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life head-on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems.

"For the time being one is doing this or that... 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.... The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever."

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