Category Archives: Puer Aeternus
The Death of Adolescence in American Culture, Part III
All of the films thus far discussed contain multiple overt references to initiation, to what Hillman describes as the initiation of the puer into puer-et-senex consciousness (239). The union of the sames. Consideration of another recent trend in the film … Continue reading
Posted in Archetypal Psychology, Art/Creativity, Cinema, Culture, Puer Aeternus
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The Death of Adolescence in American Culture, Part II
In actuality, in the first film in The Hunger Games series the conflict between puer and senex takes a while to materialize. At the beginning only one side or extreme is evident and that is the senex in its negative form. … Continue reading
Posted in Archetypal Psychology, Art/Creativity, Cinema, Culture, Puer Aeternus
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The Death of Adolescence in American Culture, Part I
Last September chief film critic for The New York Times A. O. Scott wrote a long and wide-ranging review of American culture as reflected in television and cinema. He called his piece “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” … Continue reading
Posted in Archetypal Psychology, Art/Creativity, Cinema, Culture, Puer Aeternus
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James Hillman’s Shift to Soul-Making (“From Anima-Mess to Anima-Vessel”)
Psychologist James Hillman is best known as the founder of archetypal psychology – a branch of depth psychology that developed out of and has found its place alongside Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology. And if there is … Continue reading
Posted in Archetypal Psychology, Depth Psychology, Puer Aeternus, Tributes
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The Intoxicating Power of Flight (“Puermen & Ironmen”)
The story of Icarus provides one of the more widely known examples from mythology of the puer aeternus, or eternal youth, an archetypal figure introduced in the two prior Mythfire posts. Impetuous, curious, “intoxicated with the power to fly,” and … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Myth, Puer Aeternus
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