Purer or Puer? Yes, and Puella

It occurred to me that someone searching for my blog by its title (Purer and Purer Streams…) might misspell Purer and be led to websites on the topic of the Puer. Or that someone interested in Jungian psychology and searching to learn more about the archetype of the ‘puer’ could accidentally put an R in the middle of puer and spell ‘purer’ and be led to my blog. And that’s OK, I realized—in either case the person might very well be interested with what they’ve happened upon, because I fit the puer archetype and my blog could just as easily be called Puer Streams.

In Jungian psychology (named for Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961), the puer archetype describes one who never really grows up psychologically, a person whose emotional life hasn’t progressed beyond adolescence. An eternal child, boy or girl. Think Peter Pan, my childhood hero. (Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy; for a female, the term is puella aeterna–eternal girl.) I never wanted to grow up as a kid, saw it as the death of my essence.