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Linda Leonard - Puer's Daughter
Linda Leonard - Puer's Daughter
Puer's Daughter
Linda Leonard
Published online: 17 Jan 2008.
To cite this article: Linda Leonard (1977) Puer's Daughter, Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly
Journal of Jungian Thought, 8:1, 22-31
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Linda Leonard
PUER’S DAUGHTER
and her life may become a search for this ideal father. In seeking the
ideal she is bound to a “ghostly lover,” i.e., a man who exists only in
her imagination. Hence, her relations with men and especially in the
sphere of sexuality are likely to be disturbed. The lack of commitment
she experienced with her father is likely to produce a general lack of
trust in men which may extend also to the whole realm of spirit, i.e., to
“God the Father.” At the deepest level, the Puer’s daughter suffers from
a religious problem since for her spirit was not provided by the father.
How, then, is she to find it? Anais Nin, whose father was a Puer, has
expressed it: “I have no guide. My father? I think of him as someone
my own age.”
If the daughter rejects her father due to his weakness, she often rejects
the positive qualities of the Puer as well. Consider the following dream
of a young woman who had totally rejected her alcoholic father and
who had tried to be the opposite of him in every way:
The entry to my father’s house was a small shabby cellar door.
Inside, I shivered as I saw the paper hang in greying clumps from
the wall. Black shiny cockroaches scurried along the cracked floor
and up the legs of a chipped brown table, the only piece of furniture
in the bare room. The place was no bigger than a cubicle, and I won-
dered how anyone, even my father, could live here. Suddenly fear
flooded my heart, and I sought desperately for an escape. But the door
through which I had entered seemed to have disappeared in the dim
light. Scarcely able to breath, my eyes frantically roamed the room
and f i d i y caught sight of a narrow passageway, opposite to where I
had entered. Eager to leave this distasteful and frightening room, I
hurried through the dark passage. As I came to the end my eyes were
at first blinded by the light. But then I entered into the most magnifi-
cent courtyard I had ever seen. Flowers and fountains, marble statues
of marvelous forms shone out before my eyes. Square in shape, the
courtyard was really the center of an Oriental palatial temple, with
Psychological Perspectives 25
four Tibetan turrets towering above each comer. Only then it was
that I realized that all this belonged to my father too. In fear and
trembling, awe and wonder, in bewilderment, I awoke from the dream.
The dreamer, on the conscious level, had rejected all the qualities
she saw in her father and especially the realm of the irrational and
feeling which she experienced negatively in her father’s drunken rages.
In her attempt to be unlike her h e r Father, she developed a strong
senex attitude toward life. She plunged herself into work. She tried
to live by reason, and the men she chose were rational also. But her
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personality was actually very much like her father’s, so in rejecting him
she rejected a large part of her own natural tendencies, and lived in a
mode that was really not her own. Her senex attitude toward work drove
her into compulsive ambition, but eventually the whole structure col-
lapsed and she ended up in a severe depression. Her work had suddenly
lost meaning, and the relation with her husband which had been based
on the achievement ideal had little to offer. Having lost her relation to
her feeling side, she was cut off from her own feelings, from relationship
with others, and from trust in the transcendent. Actually, in the last
analysis, her work ethic and senex attitude in itself was irrational in
that it was so extreme. Her attempt to get away from her father and
go to the opposite extreme froced her into an irrational reaction. (Orual
in C. S. Lewis’ novel, Till We Have Faces, and the woman therapist in
Ingmar Bergman’s film, Face lo Face, illustrate this structure.)
If, as in this case, the father has been destructive, it is often neces-
sary to go down with him into the destructive area rather than defending
against him, otherwise one is cut off from the potentialities that lie hid-
den in the depths. This means entering the realm of Dionysius. The
depression, which had separated her from the work world of reason,
cast her into the depths of hell where she came face to face with the
dimension she had been rejecting. Some bouts with alcohol, sex, and
hashish, including a “bad trip” in which she lived out a recurring night-
mare, opened up the side she had been defending against most of her life.
During this period she had one very frightening experience which con-
nected the creative and destructive sides of the irrational for her. While
she was on the way to a ski resort she had been reading Kierkegaard
very intensely on the subject of faith. Upon her arrival she went on a
long hike in the mountains and as she returned she saw the mountain
26 Linda Leonard
sunset which was, “suddenly more than real, wonderously beautiful but
awesomely frightening, as though Chagall, De Chirico, and Kirchner had
painted it together with God.” This experience shocked her to the point
where she thought she was going crazy, but it also opened her up in an
awesome way to the transcendent, to that which was beyond her power
to control. It was about this time that she had the dream mentioned
above. The dream opened her up to the richness that was hidden be-
hind the shabby exterior through which she saw her father. It revealed
the rich religious potential that lay hidden in the depths. Her task was
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to integrate this new possibility with the senex attitudes she had already
developed. The new realm offered infinite possibility including the possi-
bility of going mad. She needed t o be able to enter this new realm with
the sense of boundary and stability that she had previously developed.
Another possible direction the Puer’s daughter may take is to identify
partly with the h e r and remain the innocent daughter. She may disiden-
tify on some levels with the “bad boy father” and hope to compensate by
being the “innocent good girl daughter.” That is, she may become a
“puella,” an eternal girl. In this case she often becomes the inspired
daughter of a senex partner and/or an anima woman who achieves her
identity only by becoming the image of what the man wants. But then,
since she hasn’t integrated the Senex, he often becomes sour, a perverted
old man in the unconscious-perhaps not so far indeed from the puer
Don Juan father who becomes a dirty old man at the end of his life.
Consider the following dream of a Puer’s daughter:
An innocent young girl (about 16) and her friend were being
watched by an older man who was in his late 50s and who was after
the girl. He was strange, possibly crazy and perverted, and the girl
was very innocent. The friend had written a letter to her parents
about becoming independent and the two girls were discussing it. The
old man, from somewhere in the background, said, “When the inno-
cent young girl changes from pants to a long dress and her friend
stops seeing her, I will go after her.” The implkation was that he
would destroy her. One day, the young girl was looking in a mirror
and had on a beautiful long green dress. The same day her friend had
stopped seeing her because she had a boyfriend. The innocent young
girl asked her friend why, and the friend reported what the old man
had said. Then the innocent young girl realized this was her task for
adulthood and that she must confront the perverted old man. Realiz-
ing that he had been listening in on their conversation, she took his
listening device and put it in front of her so he could see that she
knew. He was angry and started to grab it and came at her, but she
Psychological Perspectives 27
which tries to order and control reality but is unable to cope with the
greater powers that be and hence fight against them until they are over-
whelmed and break down before them. Here the resolution would be
to see how the attempt to control is an unconscious reaction which
accepts only part of life, and that it is necessary to accept weakness and
fallibility and surrender to that which cannot be controlled-to the
transcendent spirit within. This pattern seems to be one in which the
Puer’s daughter denies her Puer Father, consciously takes the posture
of Senex, is then reconfronted with the Puer in the unconscious, and
from the position of senex defiance must accept the puer aspects, yet
go beyond to the transcendent.
Women who fall into the second archetypal pattern, i.e., who remain
the puella, would seem to be caught in either of the first stage of un-
conscious despair insofar as they remain unaware of their condition
(and here the task would be first to become conscious of this) or in
the despair of weakness. In the latter case they would be aware of their
weakness, their lack of logos development, but feel themselves to be
victims of it. Here the task, as I see it, would be to accept the strength
and logos potentiality within and work and struggle to build that up.
For Kierkegaard, resolution and transformation come ultimately
when despair in all stages is overcome through a leap of faith. In this
leap one accepts at the same time one’s weakness and one’s strength,
the intermixture of the finite and infinite realms in being human. Von
Franz shows this possibility of resolution in her analysis of the fairy
tale, “The Handless Maiden.”
In this fairy tale, a miller who has been out of work and is becoming
poor meets in the forest a man who promises him unlimited wealth if he
(the miller) will give this man whatever stands behind his mill. Thinking
30 Linda Leonard
he has nothing of value and that only an apple tree stands there, the
man agrees. Here again one sees the destructive aspect of the puer pat-
tern-wanting large gains for little or no work, taking the gamble
and underneath thinking one has nothing of value, nothing to lose, and
hence there is no real sacrifice. But as it turns out, his daughter was
standing there and the man in the forest turns out to be the devil, so the
father turns his daughter over to the devil, a thing which Puer Fathers
often do. This daughter, however, cries on her hands, and since the
devil cannot take someone who has so weeped, he tells the father,to cut
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off her hands and he will come back for her the next day. Unable to give
up the chance for so much fortune, the father cuts off his daughter’s
hands, but the daughter then weeps on her arms, and again the devil
cannot take her. So the devil doesn’t get the girl, and the father doesn’t
get the fortune, and the girl is now handless. Seeing the situation clearly,
she refuses to stay with the father (who too late tries to make up for
his rejection of her) and she goes off into the forest alone. Here I wish
to emphasize von Franz’s point-that here is a daughter who sees her
father’s weakness. But her handlessness, von Franz says, shows that at
the same time she realizes the ineffectiveness of the senex reaction, i.e.,
compensating through work or getting into the animus reaction of ambi-
tion, intellectualism, and so on. That she is able to weep shows that
she has not rejected emotion, but neither can she stay with her father. So
she goes off into the forest alone and waits there, trusting that help will
come. And indeed, in the fairy tale it does-she is protected by an
angel and finally saved by a king.
This fairy tale expresses the path of resolution for the Puer‘s daughter
-a conscious recognition of the father’s weakness but without the reac-
tion into the senex attempt to control-in Kierkegaard’s terminology
an acceptance of weakness together with the power of the infinite to
save-and a patient waiting for the miracle to happen. One might say
that as women in the first structure tend to fight and lose, part of the
Puer’s daughter’s problem is that she may not accept the receptive mode
and so may take the work-control route. But then, as von Franz points
out, sometimes this fails and work loses meaning and then she is left
with nothing. In contrast, the Handless Maiden accepts waiting and
the receptive mode and gains a kingdom. She is able to trust and wait in
faith and hope.
Psychological Perspectives 31
REFERENCES
Hillman, James. “Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psycho-
logical Present,” Eranos-Jahrbuch XXXVI, 1967.
Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish-
ing Co., 1956.
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1954.
Von der Heydt, Vera. “On the Father in Psychotherapy” in Fathers and
Mothers. Spring Publications, 1973.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Feminine in Fairy Tales. Spring Publications,
1972.