Peter Pan, Puer Aeternus, and the Rejection of Adulthood

Why do some people struggle with transitioning to adulthood while others do it seemingly effortlessly? What is adulthood, anyway? How do we define it as a society? And does becoming an "adult" mean having to forget about one's "inner child"?

The Puer Aeternus Personality

Most readers here will be familiar with the story of Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, published in 1904 by playwright James Matthew Barrie who novelized the play in his 1911 book Peter and Wendy. Some may have heard of the "Peter Pan syndrome" described in psychologist Dan Kiley's bestselling book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up (1983). But fewer may be aware of C.G. Jung's (1934) concepts of the puer aeternus and puella aeterna or the "eternal boy or girl."

Marie-Louise von Franz

Source: Wikimedia Commons

For Jung and his followers (see, for example, Swiss psychotherapist M.-L. von Franz's 1970 excellent book Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood), the puer or puella are a type of man or woman who, despite chronological maturation, fiercely resist emotional maturation and the behaviors, responsibilities, commitments and other cultural expectations of so-called adulthood.

The Latin term puer aeternus originates from Ovid's Metamorphoses, referring to a "child-god" or divine or "eternal youth." Jung called it the "divine child," an archetypal figure representing potentiality, balance, and wholeness, a symbol of the Self. In this sense, the puer or puella is closely related to the popular contemporary concept of the "inner child" (see my prior post), and can be understood as the manifest conflict between the "adult self" and the "child self" within the personality, each part vying to express itself and striving to have its needs met in the world, something quite common in clinical practice and a key to therapeutic progress when recognized and properly addressed.

Is the Puella or Puer a Type of Personality Disorder?

Though not a formally recognized disorder by the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5-TR (2022), as with certain psychiatric diagnoses such as psychosis, psychopathy, or borderline personality, puer or puella are terms that tend to at times be used pejoratively by some clinicians when referring to patients who, in various ways, appear to be obstinately refusing or resisting growing up. The typical puer or puella personality is "resistant to commitment in work or relationships and unable to completely abandon the dreams and fantasies of adolescence" (1970) or of childhood. This pattern of behavior has also been described by Jung, Baynes, and von Franz as the "provisional life," meaning that, in most cases, no real roots are put down nor major commitments made so as to keep one's options open as much as possible to something better or more exciting or meaningful happening in the future.

Moreover, there is a general tendency to avoid tedium, hard work, and ordinariness, which prevents the puer or puella from pursuing and attaining what they truly want due to being unwilling to accept the boring and difficult task of actually achieving it. Hard, sustained, monotonous work is something they have no patience for. Such provisional behavior has been compared to a beautiful butterfly flitting endlessly from one flower to another, tasting the various sweet nectars rather than lighting on one for any significant length of time.

There is a strong avoidance of anything that would limit or curtail one's freedom and potentialities in life. This assiduous avoidance could consist of refusing to choose and fully commit to a profession or job, place to live such as a city, state, or country, purchasing (if financially feasible) or renting and remaining in a home or residence for any significant period of time, being relatively non-committal regarding marriage or other intimate relationships, etc. The secret here is that the puer or puella does not ever want to be pinned down (like a collected butterfly), bound, hindered, restrained, constricted, forced or limited by finitude, reality, tedium, ordinariness, or even death. They tend to be what are euphemistically called "free spirits."

Paradoxically, the puer or puella strives to exemplify the observation by Heraclitus that one can never step into the same stream twice but, at the same time, they cannot fully commit themselves to the moment. They cannot be firmly grounded and fully present in the here-and-now. Indeed, from a more existential perspective, the puer or puella can be seen as rebelling against the existential facts of finitude and mortality: If one refuses to grow up or get old, one cannot die. So this syndrome is fundamentally, and typically unconsciously, a denial of death and its inevitability.

And it entails also a protest against the loss or limitation of our protean nature toward transformation, change, and growth. (Proteus was in Greek mythology a prophetic water god who would constantly shift his shape to escape whenever caught, confronted or questioned.)

What happens when the essence of who we are and how we want to live does not comport with the preconceived image of adulthood held and promulgated by parents, peers, and society as a whole? There is a profound resistance in the puer and puella to subjectively define oneself or be objectively defined by others. The refusal to be pigeon-holed, categorized, labeled, or perceived as being just this or that, fish or fowl. Not wanting to be forced by society into some preconceived notion of adulthood and then being defined in that way. Clinging to the intrinsic capacity to recreate or reinvent ourselves at any time as we so desire, something that becomes more difficult to do as we grow older.

Who Defines Adulthood?

For instance, must every person marry or have children or some career to be considered an adult? What if this is not the kind of life they envision or wish to create for themselves? What if they choose to never marry, nor have children, nor commit to any particular career, job, or geographic location in which to reside? Does this really make someone neurotic and not an adult? Or might they just be a different type of adult? A non-conformist refusing to turn themselves and their lives into what society tells them to.

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As Freud discusses in his classic text Civilization and its Discontents (1930), the implicit and explicit collective pressures of socialization can be experienced as stifling or suffocating the individual's instincts and natural way of being in the world, which results in feelings of discontent, frustration, resentment, and anger. From this perspective, it could be asked: Which is more mature and adult? To conform and submit to societal pressures and expectations regarding lifestyle and its consequences or to try to be true to oneself in finding and fulfilling one's personal destiny, whatever that may be, despite the collective disapproval and guilt feelings such uncompromising integrity, authenticity, and individuality engenders?

Of course, there are powerful, primal, archetypal, and primitive biological urges or instincts for procreation and perpetuation of the human race to consider that compel the individual toward reproduction and relationship during adolescence and beyond. But who ultimately decides what adulthood looks like? Does becoming an adult necessarily mean submitting or surrendering to such powerful instinctual drives? Or can one decide whether to do so not?

One example of such a choice is the deeply religious or spiritual person's decision to be celibate, meaning not to marry or have sex, as in, say the case of Catholic priests, nuns, or Buddhist monks like the Dalai Lama (see my prior post.) Are such people all puers or puellas? Perhaps, but this prejudicial perception fails to recognize and appreciate the healthy, positive, spiritual, creative aspects of the puer aeturnus or puella aeterna personality of which each of us partakes to some extent.