Clinical work with ten cases of second-generation Holocaust survivors–and other second-generation Jewish refugee-immigrants to Israel–showed that many of the subjects had difficulty entering adult life, assuming roles, finding suitable professions, marrying, and settling down. After working for some years more with such cases, I now realize that there are other problems and difficulties: puer states with all their accompanying phenomena, or the senex side of the archetype, which becomes significant in patients who are traumatized too early. The "Senex" immigrants have adapted well to collective norms and their puer side sits well in the shadow. But they have difficulty, as adults, in finding meaning to their lives. My comments reflect, in addition, my own experience as an Israeli, born to a generation of immigrants who, as youths, escaped from Germany and Austria during the Second World War.
I realize also, as part of the process of maturing into adulthood, the importance of attachment to our broader roots. Bringing about an encounter with these roots is part of the parents' role in helping the child to bridge the gap from childhood to adulthood. The parents undertake this role best if they are attached meaningfully to their own pasts.
But what happens when the parents themselves have torn away from their past and unable to transmit it? What if they can depend only on the future? What kind of conscious and unconscious messages does the child receive? What does it mean to grow up? Does the child want to? Perhaps he or she has something worthwhile to say as a child or–for the male–as a puer. Before forcing him to grow up, we should try to hear the call of the puer, remaining first in the archetypal realm and moving from there to the personal level through the etiologic and clinical pictures by which the condition reveals itself.
At the archetypal level, two different points can be emphasized for a better understanding of the puer's nature. Von Franz (1970) emphasizes the attachment of the puer to the mother archetype; he appears as the son/lover and not as the youth. Von
Franz does not perceive him as a principal counter to the senex; in this way, she misses the socio-cultural collective influence and its possible fertilization by the inspirational nature of the puer.
Hillman's (1979) emphasis is well-placed. He developed the idea of the puersenex continuum and interaction as a possibility of growth or as a danger of being possessed. Only in a personal situation can a puer sometimes become united too closely with the mother complex or with other complexes; at the archetypal level, the puer complex must be examined separately. Like Jung, Hillman describes the puer archetype as the principle of growth and renewal–a creative movement. Youth and freshness are not committed to heavy tradition, and by nature, incorporate a great deal of naivete. In contrast, but not to be considered separately, is the senex–an old man–the personification of the archetypal principle of time, order, decisive principles, crystallization of law and rules of this world's culture and history. In understanding the puer as part of the senex-puer continuum, we must examine the socio-cultural background we are dealing with, in order to give place to the senex pole and, thus to give some ground to the puer.
To study the puer-senex in the Holocaust generation and the succeeding one seems too extreme, but I broaden it to include the issue of the new generation after the stress of migration. My hypothesis is that, in forced migration of uprooted people, there are enhancing factors in both generations that cause the puer to be active. There is an abrupt early "weaning" of the child, pseudo-maturity, and, later in life, a clinging to adolescence and its attendant phenomena. An important factor is a difficulty encountered by the previous generation: uprooted from its well-known surroundings and supportive sociocultural environment, and having to adapt to a new one and, to a certain extent, is dependent on the offspring. To comprehend better the puer-senex as part of generation interaction and its impact on the individual, it is necessary to understand the issue in the specific context of the new Israeli collective that has been established over the last five or six decades.
The New-Old Collective
Israel, "Alt-Neuland" (old-new land)–as the visionary, Theodore Herzl, called it-is a state that was established mainly out of a mixed population of Jewish immigrants from all over the world, especially Europe and the Arab countries. Many of them came, not of their own free will, but as refugees fleeing their countries of origin. Although they arrived while Israel was still fighting for its existence and independence, for them Israel was not merely symbolic, but a real haven of refuge. Landing in the new homeland stirred in most of these immigrants a series of new/old feelings, even a sense of redemption. These new feelings of affiliation, reinforced by the deep, painful disappointments in their past, aroused in them enormous expectations and hopes. They tended to idealize the new nation and its "Israeliness," and to degrade the past of the Diaspora–the Jewishness.
Zionism tried to be more like the distant biblical past than the recent Jewish past of the Diaspora. The new, idealistic Israelis felt that they must be proud and strong, with heads held high and shoulders back, actively contrasting with the picture of the weak, bent Diaspora Jews. A painful split, albeit an artificial one, began between the Israelis and the Diaspora Jews, which would take many years to heal. People were encouraged to forget their pasts, the places they came from, and even their cultures. Some even felt ashamed of their origins with their victimization and tried to hide it. Differences in people's pasts and cultures, and the uniqueness of each group, were regarded as threats to national unity.
Thus, people became ambivalent toward their own identities.
Denial of their origins caused considerable damage to the creative life of these people. The collective, although not yet consolidated or based on its true foundations, assumed a large measure of power over the individual. The new, inexperienced collective was quite dogmatic and nationalistic, unsure whether to be ideological, religious, or tribal. There were strong influences of parent archetypes projected onto the land; heroes and myths of old came alive once more. The archetype of resurrection and rebirth, the one most relevant to our study, was felt everywhere. Behind all that, in the shadows, lurked the picture of the wandering "Shtetl Jew" of the Diaspora, who survived persecution and the wounds of the Holocaust with its deep traumas, rages, and anxieties.
The father of one of my patients wrote to him on the day of his bar mitzvah:
To my son: Never have I had a day of joy; never real happiness; always the Ghetto, the great war, Auschwitz. No…No! you must not cry; you should not take a pill; you are not ill and you are not crazy. It is reality that comes back through memories. You don't cure it; you don't anesthetize it. This is your life, and tonight you can celebrate, because from that death, those ashes and the blood, new life emerged. There is a boy, a Jewish boy, and a victory! This is our celebration!
You are our victory!
My patient commented, "That was one of the few nights that I slept without a pill."
Let us turn to the smaller unit in which the actual generation interchange is taking place. There the child is socialized and receives most of his or her ability to become an adult in a given society. When we analyze the various factors in that system in a condition of immigration and try to determine which of them is crucial for us to understand the etiology of the unconscious complexity of the puer archetype, we see that there are parents' factors and children's factors.
The parents' factors are the wounds sustained on tearing away from their families and their previous culture: failure to adapt to the new environment; detachment from the inner child; depression at having given up on the meaning of their own personal selves; the impossible expectations, both conscious and unconscious, of the child; and last, but not least, the parents' ability or inability to pass the child through to the outside world of society and culture.
The child's factors are sensitivity and intuition: the ability to read the parents' messages; they need to help the parent emotionally. It is the creative, spiritual child, one who is more open to the archetypal world and to that of the parents, who will be tuned in to them and will be more susceptible. The child with greater cultural, social, and spiritual needs that have not been met will feel the split in the parents' identity and will suffer.
The Families of holocaust Survivors
Those who survived the Holocaust were, in most cases, the only ones remaining in their families and are still in fear of annihilation. To have a part in building a new country, creating a new family, and having children were the most important and healing. The new country symbolized life and continuity. Their children, in their new home, became the sunshine, source of warmth, and light for the parents. Also, Israel was proof of victory over the Nazi intention to destroy the nation. The children became the raison d'étre of their parents' lives. There is a great deal of research describing the parents' expectations from their children, claiming them as compensation for their loss and using them as substitutes for those destroyed. (See Trossman, 1968; Sigal, 1973) Rather than being individuals in their own right, the children became symbols of their parents' loss. It appears, then, that the expectations projected onto the child's role of memorial to the parents' loss were the reasons for the severe separation difficulties that most of these children suffer. It seems that both generations suffered unavoidable pain. The parents built their identities around the new generation; their own lives were restricted to surviving, after being cut off from their inner life and their past. The children gave up their identities, becoming the hopes, promises, and extensions of their parents.
One might ask why in such a situation–being such a support and being rewarded for maturity–the child chooses, instead, to become a puer, refusing to assume an adult state? In such a stressful situation, it would appear easier to understand children who successfully pass through adolescence without crises, but pay the price of getting caught in the senex state. They continue to be the serious ones, meeting the norms of the collective through the expectations of their parents and they build up, even earlier, a falsely mature self as a way of existence. But what about the puers? What are they aiming at?
Onto the puer types, the characterization of puerile adolescent personality has been thrust. All of them were youthful and creative, wore sunny smiles, and were full of enthusiasm. They were sensitive to the analyst, carrying a sense of hidden omnipotence and ambition to do something important an&meaningful. Inwardly, however, they felt very old, tired, and detached, saying that they knew exactly what it meant to be a grownup To them, it meant being unattractive, empty, and depressed, with no creative soul. In all the cases, one can feel the pressure on the child, of his or her importance to the parents, and an enormous need to satisfy the parents, even to the extent of the children's sacrificing themselves.
Dina Wardi (1990) writes about two main messages transmitted from the parents to their children and sealed in their souls. The first is to remind the world of what happened in the Holocaust; the second is to fill the void created by the loss of their dear ones. It seemed that they had to continue to play the role of those that had been lost but, for them, there was no real attachment to the past. Anything before the Second World War just wasn't there. So the message was, "You are the generation that must continue, but behind us there is only destruction, death and emotional vacuum. You have to build the family and the nation, and sometimes even to give your life for them." Underneath, of course, were the shadowy emotions of deprivation and sometimes hidden envy. Of course, there was also a message of the proof of victory.
Case No. l: Yuval
We encounter a hero, brave and strong. We have already read his father's letter to him on his bar mitzvah. For Yuval to come to analysis was another new injury. He had always thought of himself as strong, brave, young, and talented, with no need for anyone's help. He was the apple of his anxious, depressed but ambitious father's eye, and also of his poor mother, a Holocaust survivor. His parents found each other on their way to Israel. They did not acclimatize well to their new country, and Yuval was always ashamed of their old-world behavior. He sought treatment because of the symptoms he was presenting: jumpiness, attacks of panic, wild gestures. Otherwise, he would not have come. He jumped from job to job, unable to find real interest in any of them. He began every new enterprise with a burst of excitement that faded very quickly. He took a wife, knowing he would leave her soon after. One foot was already on the way out. He was quick, intuitive, and full of ideas that he never could apply. Here he was writing a book, and there composing a new song. He has just found a wonderful, new puella, but tomorrow he will meet the true one.
From childhood, Yuval had to face his broken father, trying hard to read his needs, frustrations, and inability to be happy. His fantasies fluctuated between becoming a millionaire–saving his father from his feeling of being poor–and being an artist because he was creative, talented, and musical. One of the first dreams Yuval brought to the treatment was:
I am making a very vigorous climb on a steep hill; a fiery torch is in my hand and nay parents and my sisters are following me. It is a gloomy, dark night; my father and ni0ther look like two refugees, wearing ragged clothes. I am glad I have the torch, which is beautiful and gives light, but I feel my legs hurting me more and more. I look down al them and see that lam barefoot and bleeding. It becomes harder and harder and more and more painful to walk.
The situation created in the dream was clear: Yuval began to realize the role he plays in his family and in his life anywhere. He talked of what he did in the army: the risks he took, the sacrifices he made, his readiness to do anything in order to save others, and be the officer of whom his father was so proud.
For Yuval, coming to analysis was like retirement after a long period of labor. He confessed how afraid he was, how childish he was underneath, and how much he wanted someone to discover his disguise. Yuval was preoccupied with the mood of the therapist. Sometimes, he was more sensitive to me, my moods, health, and expectations than I was myself. He knew how to satisfy and be the star patient. There were much twinship transference and a feeling of brotherhood that was healing, probably, for both participants. After taking up his role as a savior, Yuval calmed down and gradually revealed and confronted his puer face–which was his true one. The analysis made him aware of his omnipotent powers and his wish to do something great and important for his family and for the nation. But underneath was the need to save his father in order to have one.
Yuval also revealed a great deal of spiritual interest; in the analysis, this interest shifted to a greater interest in his father's family, past and culture. Yuval discovered that he had grown up without a father, without anyone to guide him, with no cultural heritage or past, or any real tradition. He came to realize how different he felt from the typical Israeli man. His discovery of how Jewish and how much more European he was given his identity a new dimension. Yuval had to give up his torch and his inflated feelings and begin to heal his own wounded feet. It was difficult and painful to mourn his inability to be a proper child, stealing bits of it, like a thief, whenever he could. Yuval gave up his torch only when he could have another kind of light, another consciousness, for his own true self.
Case No. 2: Gili
Gili, in his late twenties, came for treatment because of his inability to continue his vocation of a social worker, inability to establish steady relationships, all coupled with terrible anxiety regarding marriage and settling down. Like Yuval, Gili was charming, creative, full of enthusiasm, had a beautiful smile, and was always optimistic and cheerful. He was addicted to movies and books, reading everything new and living much of the time in a world of fantasy. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors. His father, a very nervous man, would even beat Gili in a frenzy of rage when he brought his food back from school uneaten and hidden in his drawings. Gili was the favorite son, the bright one, the one who was supposed to raise the family's achievements.
He recounted, "I was the family project, the scholar that my father had never been, and the cultured one that both of my parents were not. My father decided that I was to be a doctor while he worked as a clerk in the office of a medical center, always twing to pass himself off as a real M.D." In treatment, he confessed, "Even from childhood I knew that I was playing and acting as if I really was a genius, and in fact, there were times when I actually believed it.
For Gili, it was a lightening of his burden to have a vessel, where he could, at last, begin to be himself and stop being a project of a new father (the therapist). He always found himself being put into that niche, but he always backed away. "Don't you fall into that trap," was his hidden message to me. He enumerated the many people who had been disappointed in him when he failed to fulfill his promises. Gradually Gili became aware of the puer side of himself, which held him high and distant from his confusion, depression, and identity issue. He was afraid of life, of growing up, taking responsibility, and being an empty, melancholic senex like his father. Confronting his depression was important, yet frightening. Gili had numerous nightmares and anxieties that emerged during the analysis:
"No one prepared me for this life: no one told me about the real world. I feel like an orphan, wandering around; a real, lost project." That was the beginning of the emergence of Gili's true self. From the cheerful, promising puer came the orphan and the true self, and Gili now knew why he clung for about ten years more than he should have to the role of Peter Pan from never-never land.
Gili saw in me a father figure who could accept him, but who also was able to see through his posturing, and not let him play his unnecessary games. At the beginning of treatment, Gili greatly feared that my disappointment with him would cause me to abandon him. He tried very hard to be a perfect patient, wanting to bring success to me, my reputation, and especially my new ideas in the field. For Gili, too, as for the others, it was very difficult to emerge from the puer state and transform it into something more meaningful. He suffered greatly while coming to terms with his limitations, his inability to work properly, his inadequacy in entering adult life.
Part of Gili's motivation in giving up the puer state was the new meaning that he found in getting married, having a family, and assuming the responsibilities of fatherhood, which later became the most important part of his life. He even told me that he sent his wife to develop a career while he took over "the big project" of raising their children. He found it rewarding and perhaps even healing when recalling and coping with his own orphan state. Recently, he has changed jobs, having been accepted as a worker in a new project for gifted children, combining arts and sciences. For Gili, it appears to be compensation for his own culturally-deprived childhood.
In these cases, one was the project of the family; the other was the hero who, with his new, fresh spirit, would be the father's savior and the pride of the whole family. It was Alice Miller (1979) who introduced the term "the gifted child": the child who is especially sensitive to the parents' needs and probably does self-damage by being too devoted to the parents' wounds. This mutually sensitive parent-child system has a strong impact on the child's psyche, influencing the strength of the ego and the rapidity of the child's growth, especially when the parents had undergone trauma.
In earlier years, the second generation used to be called "the generation of the desert." They had been born on the way to the new Israel, between two cultures, midway between two stages of the Jewish nation. They were quicker to adapt to the new situation than were their parents. Their sensitivity and instant maturity resulted in an inability to assume adult roles when the time came. They claim, "I know the story of being grown-up and adult. What's the big deal?" Spoken like a cynical, melancholic old senex.
Discussion
There are two levels of interaction between puer and senex: the collective level and the personal one, the macro and the micro. With the trauma of the Holocaust and subsequent uprooting, one can see the causes and effects that brought about the painful occurrence of the puer complex.
We have seen how the new-old collective was created, in the course of the building of the new country. We saw the detachment of the immigrants from their roots, culture, and social systems, they're clinging to the new piece of land as an anchor, countering the trauma of their abandonment. They saw it as their investment in hope and dependence on new ideals and a future generation. We have seen the split that occurred between the new and the old. Living in this intense atmosphere of redemption and rebirth revived many old themes from the distant past, like the old-time heroes from archetypal layers. This constituted a favorable atmosphere for the emergence of the puer.
Returning to the perspective of the personal-familial level, children were mostly overprotected and had enormous importance for their parents. They were exposed very early in life, whether consciously or unconsciously, to a great deal of their parents' misery and helplessness, and were given all kinds of impossible messages about being the "victory" and the reason for their parents' life. This is a heavy burden to lay on a child who cannot protest and has no legitimate way to bear the suffering. Being unable to display one's own weaknesses and flaws is a crucial factor in the development and maintenance of the puer's inflated wishes to save, heal, and redeem. Busy with the redemption of others, he forgets about his own. Hillman (1979) emphasizes the splitting of the puer-Senex continuum as a crucial factor in the creation of the negative senex:
cynical, depressive, discouraging; and the hyper manic puer–hovering, detached, or fading.
The split could be caused either by the parents' overly difficult life, by their spiritual damage, or their lack of attachment to their own broader roots. In the case of a lack of roots, they will transmit to the child a lack of meaning, inducing a cynical way of dragging the burden of life, teaching the child that life is all a struggle, with no pleasure.
By understanding the reasons on one hand and the prospect toward which the puer is aiming at the other, we can go beyond the one-dimensional prism through which von Franz (1970) views the puer syndrome. We can also broaden the solution she suggests. Because she emphasizes work and an ability to be committed as the main problems and not as symptoms of a deeper wound, her approach appears to be somewhat didactic and preaching, lacking in healing qualities. Looking at her words according to Hillman's concepts, her voice is coming from the negative side of the senex, which the puer can arouse easily.
Beneath the surface of this colorful but sometimes irritating picture presented by the puer, lies a child who, though wounded, does not cease looking for a lost childhood and does not give up trying to understand better how to become a true adult with a true self. Like Icarus or Peter Pan, the puer will fly higher and higher, whirling, until he gets into a crisis and falls down. His main motivation is not narcissistic–although it can be seen in that way–but to get into the true secrets of life. Whether tradition, art, or nature, he will approach each in a fresh, naive way. Like the child in "The Emperor's New
Clothes," he can become obsessed with truths. He can become a wandering, drifting, lonely person, looking for all kinds of experiences, as if there had been no one to initiate him into the world and its secrets.
In the analysis, it seems that the real meaning and true secrets of life can come only after he gets in touch with his own wounds: the deprivation, the orphaned state, loneliness, and detachment. Only then, as a grownup, mourning his childhood and "crying his cry," as Hillman called it, will he get out of his inflation and new meaning will emerge. The puer does not need a mother in the sense of milk or mirroring his narcissistic needs. He needs a place and another adult who believes him, accepting his puer side and giving him space to cry his own tears by coming to terms with his incapability and his failure to save his parents. He needs someone who will help him cease needing to be a chosen child, to cease searching for a healing elixir for the mother or being the parents' project, and to give up the torch, making room for a new light that will illuminate his true child self.