James Hillman is probably the most significant thinker to have emerged from the Jungian tradition. In some ways, perhaps, he even transcended it, to form his own version called archetypal psychology, though like Jung he also refused to endorse a "school" of psychology as such.
The current volume contains a number of essays on the matter of the puer aeternis which is literally the eternal boy, though Hillman expressly states this archetype is one that can affect women, so I will refer to it as child in this review. Marie-Louise von Franz, another major thinker in the Jungian tradition, has also written a significant volume on this matter (
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts)
) which is also sometimes also known a "Peter Pan" syndrome, the problem of people who are unable to grow up.
Hillman however has another take on this. The child is not so much a problem as a solution. The child who experiments and expands boundaries for us. In a later essay he points out one perhaps should not look at such a child in relation to the mother and how it suckles. More important is the milk it takes to transform itself into life. However, he also suggests just as important as the child is another figure who it has to be seen in relation to, the senex, or the elder. The senex is the holder of limits, conventions, the one that has experienced woundings and who may be advising caution to the child as it knows that death is also a possibility. It is therefore the relationship between these two images that are important to consider.
The essays in this volume centre around the interactions of these two figures. But also on the two as forms of consciousness in their own right, on the nature of soul and spirit, nostalgia, opportunity and woundings. Many of the essays can be read individually on their own. The one I particularly enjoyed is one on the experience of betrayal which Hillman looks at on all levels: our feelings of being betrayed by parents, friends, as well as by nature and ourselves, and how we can recover from them.
The introduction suggests that these are a companion piece to Hillman's work
RE-Visioning Psychology
. Possibly, but this volume may be easier to follow than the other book as it is in more manageable pieces. It is also perhaps less complex because Hillman's erudition (like Jung's) is sometimes overwhelming. It might be better to read some of Hillman's more populist works like
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
or
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse
first to acquaint themselves with his style. That said "Senex & Puer" is not too hard to follow and is essential reading in the opus of this great thinker.
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![Senex & Puer (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 3) by [James Hillman, Glen Slater]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/114CSzIjovS._SY346_.jpg)
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