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Puer aeternus or puella aeterna is an archetypal pattern of behavior prominent in certain men and women.

The puer phenomenon is not a formal personality disorder.

The puer or puella syndrome can have both negative and positive effects on our lives.

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."

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........

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