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Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly

Journal of Jungian Thought
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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

In working with female analysands, the question of how a Puer

Father affects the daughter’s personal growth and development has
become a vital question for me. But in my search through the Jungian
literature, I found that most of the articles on the father pertain to the
Senex Father, i.e., the father who has been authoritarian, giving values,
the “Old King.” As James Hillman, in his article, “Senex and Puer,”
describes him, the Senex in his positive aspect provides stability and
certainty; he is potentially the Wise Old Man. But in his negative aspect
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he manifests coldness, hardness, and exile from life.

But what about the Puer Father? The Puer, as Marie-Louise von
F r a u points out in her book, Puer Aeternus, is a man who remains an
eternal boy, who remains too long in the adolescent stage. He tends
to be a romantic dreamer who is looking for a mother goddess, wanting
to escape the conflicts of practical life, and unable to commit himself.
He dwells in a realm of possibilities, avoids actuality, and leads the
“provisional life.” By disposition he is impatient; he has not developed
the quality to “hold,” to bear through a difficult situation. According to
von Franz, such a life-style may exhibit itself in homosexuality, Don
Juanism, various forms of addiction, or mere philosophical speculation.
The Puer is not totally negative, though, for his connection with the
mother principle gives him a close contact with the unconscious and
the springs of creativity; he is often a sensitive searcher for spirit. But
since his interior year centers around spring and summer, the depth
and re-birth which comes from fall and winter is lacking.
Like the Senex, the Puer too has positive and negative aspects. Posi-
tively he reveals spirit to us in the form of possibility, the creative
spark, the search. But negatively he never cames through to completion
since he avoids hard times and the down to earth work and struggle
required to make the possible actual. Hillman points out that at bottom
the Senex and Puer are linked; they are two opposing aspects of a single
archetype. The development of the masculine requires their integration.
When they are not consciously integrated, then we are faced with a pos-
 Psychological Perspectives 23

session by one face on the conscious level with a corresponding influ-

ence from the other face in the unconscious. Hence where there is a Puer,
hiding in the shadow is the leering face of the Senex. Where there is
lofty idealism, in the background is the sneer of cynicism. Likewise,
where the senex emphasis on duty and rationally sticking to what must
be done is in the foreground, puerile moods and impulses are in the un-
conscious, popping out irrationally at unexpected moments.
With this integral archetypal relation between Senex and Puer in mind,
I would like to explore the way a daughter might be affected in her
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development by the Puer Father, focusing here only on the destructive

aspect. That is, can we find in the daughter patterns which have devel-
oped as a result of the destructive influence of a Puer Father? And,
further, can we gain some insight into the way these patterns, if they
are destructive, may be integrated into a more meaningful whole?
In order to approach this we must now turn to the h e r as father and
see what is lacking. Archetypally, the father principle provides the values
of authority, responsibility, decision making, objectivity, law and order,
and discipline. The father is the first model of the logos principle; he
introduces his daughter to the outside world, helping her to cope with
the world and its confiicts; and as such is the first model of masculinity
for his daughter. Through him the animus is initially formed. If his own
masculinity is split into a negative opposition between Senex and Puer,
the daughter’s animus will most probably be split too unless she has had
other prominent and formative masculine figures in her life. Vera von der
Heydt, in her article “On the Father in Psychotherapy,” points out that
the role of the father is to mediate for his children between the exciting
world outside and the home, and that his attitude toward work and suc-
cess will color the child’s attitude. If he is confident and successful this
will communicate to his children, but if he is afraid and unsuccessful
the children will most likely take over this fearful attitude. Hence it is the
father’s confident relation to the world which encourages the child to be
secure and confident and also to discover genuine limits and boundaries.
In the case of the Puer Father, most of these qualities are lacking,
since the Puer himself is governed more by the mother and the uncon-
scious. Of course, since consciousness springs from the unconscious, the
father has to have a good relationship to the mother world as well. But
the h e r has not come to terms with his own limits and authority-hence
 24 Linda Leonard

he cannot be an adequate model for his children in these respects. Thus

the Puer’s daughter grows up without an adequate mode for authority;
and so she often lacks a sense of her own authority. She may suffer from
insecurity, instability, lack of self-confidence, anxiety, frigidity, and in
general, a weak ego. Moreover, if the Puer Father was overtly weak (as
in the case of the man who doesn’t work and/or the addict), the daugh-
ter is likely to suffer from shame; and, if she was ashamed of her father,
she is likely to carry this sense of shame over to herself. In such cases
she often builds up in the unconscious an ideal image of man and father
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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

forcefully kicked him in the crotch and he went reeling backward.

Enraged, he took a bucket of water that had been used to wash the
strawberries and he tried to throw this dirty old waste water from the
strawberries on her, but she gkabbed the bucket and forcefully threw
the water back on him. As she did it, a voice told her that this was a
test in the fairy tales of four different languages.
Here we h d a transformation from girlish innocence to mature
womanhood. The dreamer must consciously confront the perverted
masculine aspect which wants to destroy her and fight back. She must
leave the role of innocence which may manifest itself on the concrete
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level as helplessness, dependence, guiltlessness, being a victim-and in-

stead assume responsibility for the strength she really has. She must be-
come, in Casteneda’s terms, a wa,rrior. The chief task in the dream is
not to let the perverted old man throw the old dirty waste water from
the strawbemes on her. Strawberries can be taken as an Eros symbol,
and so in this case it would mean not to fall victim to negative animus
opinions which distrust and devalue love (e.g., “no one could ever love
me”), but to throw it back and liquidate such cynicism.
This woman had the tendency to project her own strength on others
and expected to be “cared for” by her analysts. Bascially, she did not
take responsibility for herself, and felt she could only be “cured by love,
the love her father had never given her.” In expecting the care and ac-
tion to come from the other, she remained passive, a little girl wanting to
be mothered and fathered by everyone. She lacked positive animus or
masculine development, i.e., the qualities of consciousness, discipline,
courage, and decision making; and it was not surprising since there had
been no positive influence in her life from her father or any masculine
figure. The masculine was present only in this figure of the perverted
old man. It seems to me that the Puer’s daughter who has taken the
puella direction has certain tasks before her. She must shake loose
from her innocence and lack of commitment, become aware of her goal
to become mature and responsibly fight the dangers that the feminine
without the integration of the masculine present-narcissism, depres-
sion, suicidal feelings, inertia, and self-pity. And, if she loses sight of
her task and struggle before she has built up those qualities which her
father has failed to help her develop, she will remain forever a puella.
Here it may be helpful to bring in some insights from Soren Kierke-
gaard, the Danish philosopher-theologian. Kierkegaard, in Sickness Unto
 28 Linda Leonard

Death, analyzes various stages of despair, i.e., stages of disrelatiomhip to

the self (a notion of self that in many ways is not so different from
Jung’s view). For Kierkegaard, there are three major forms of despair:
first, a despair that is unconscious; second, despair that is conscious and
which manifests itself as weakness; and third, despair which is conscious
and manifests itself as defiance.
In the unconscious form of despair, the person is out of relation to
the self, but is unaware of it. Such a person, according to Kierkegaard,
tends to live a hedonistic life, dispersed in sensation of the moment,
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having no commitment to anything higher than ego-impulses. This is

the stage of aestheticism and Don Juanism. Here one can see a puer
type of existence in which the person does not, on the conscious level at
least, realize he is in despair although, as Kierkengaard points out, the
compulsiveness for infinite sensation and pleasure together with intrud-
ing dark moments of boredom and anxiety reveal that all is not well.
If the person allows the dark moments of boredom and anxiety to
enter fully into consciousness, then he becomes aware that he is in
despair. At this point the person realizes he is out of relation to the
self (which transcends ego-identity) but feels he is too weak to choose
the self since that demands that one accept one’s strength to make that
decision. Here the person despairs over his weakness to commit himself
to something higher than the ego-impulses. I imagine that many Puers
suffer intensely in the despair of weakness-wanting to be courageous
and take the risk of actuality, the risk of commitment, yet somehow
afraid and unable to take the leap.
But, if the person penetrates more consciously into the reason for
his weakness, then he becomes aware that his excuse of weakness was
really only a way of avoiding the strength he always already had. He
realizes that what he took to be weakness was really defiance, i.e., a
refusal to commit himself. For Kierkegaard, the despair of defiance is a
higher consciousness, a realization that one has the strength to choose
the self, or in Kierkegaard’s terms, to make the leap of faith which re-
quires acceptance of the uncontrollable and transcendent, but that one
chooses not to do so in stark defiance against the higher powers which
transcend reason and man’s finitude. In defiance, one refuses to change!
In the despair of defiance one refuses possibility and infinitude; in the
despair of weakness one refuses actuality and finitude. So that the end,
 Psychological Perspettives 29

in either stage, is to refuse both. I have been working and struggling

with Kierkegaard for many years, but just recently it struck me that
the despair of weakness is really an aspect of the h e r archetypal pattern,
while the despair of defiance is that of the Senex. And yet in the end
they are secretly the same, just as Hillman points out the secret iden-
tity existing between the Puer and Senex.
Women who fall into the first archetypal pattern, i.e., who reject the
Puer Father and all that goes with him (the weakness, irrationality,
etc.) are likely to end up in the despair of defiance, a senex position
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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

In both of the archetypal patterns of the Puer’s daughter which I have

been trying to bring out there is a split between pleasure and work, in-
nocence and responsibiIity, between the h e r and Senex. One opts
consciously for the senex ideal, but is possessed unconsciously by her
father’s puer side. In order to develop she must accept the value of the
puer aspect and come to a new integration. The other has identified with
the puer side. For her to grow she has to develop the senex side and go
beyond to a more wholistic position. At bottom, both have the task of
integrating both the puer and senex archetype. Returning to Kierke-
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gaard’s stages of despair, I wonder if they can be regarded in part (from

the Jungian perspective at least) as an aid to understanding animus
development for the Puer’s daughter. I suspect that if one starts out
with the despair of weakness (the puella) and goes onto the despair of
defiance (senex), there may be a difficulty after the warrior-senex stage
to return to the receptive attitude of the Handless Maiden. But if one
starts out with the senex-defiance reaction and then returns to the puer
aspect that has been rejected, one still must from there pass through the
Handless Maiden’s willingness to wait and be receptive. The senex atti-
tude is not receptive because it tries to control. But neither is the puella
attitude receptive since it is passive and genuine receptivity is active. The
Handless Maiden’s receptivity and faith seems to me in both cases to
be a prelude to integration, a commitment to enduring the tension of
the opposites--Senex and Puer.

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.