Forever 21: The Eternal Child in Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss

Moving out, beginning a career, getting married: though the

details vary across history and cultures, such coming of age rit-

uals nevertheless represent the time in a young person’s life

when they finally take on an adult’s responsibilities and privi-

leges. But what happens when that transition is never made? Carl

Jung’s archetype of the puer aeturnus perfectly captures this

phenomenon. Latin for “eternal child”, the puer aeturnus is an

adult trapped in a teenager’s psychological state. He craves in-

dependence and rejects boundaries; he drifts through life aim-

lessly, caught up in fantasies. Jung made this observation

decades before author Kathryn Harrison was born, and it proved to

be a prescient one: Harrison’s generation was the first to expe-

rience what we now term “extended adolescence”, the delaying of

traditional adult milestones. Harrison, like many of her cohort,

did not have a smooth transition into adulthood. Eschewing mature

romantic relationships for an insecure incestuous attachment to

her father, unable to emotionally progress from her feud with her

mother, Harrison’s memoir The Kiss demonstrates the varying de-

grees to which all three members of the family embody the puer

aeturnus archetype.

Jung writes that the child archetype is born from abandon-

ment, and indeed, Harrison’s childhood is fundamentally marked by

her parents’ absence. While Harrison’s father has always been an

infrequent presence in her life, Harrison’s mother’s rejection of

her daughter is far more deliberate. For the first few years of

her life, Harrison’s mother, though ostensibly physically

present, evades her responsibilities by lying asleep until late

in the day. When she is six, her mother gives up any pretense of

full-time parenthood and moves out. Harrison is acutely aware of

this betrayal; she writes: “She sees me often, but she comes and

goes at her own discretion: she does not want to be summoned by

fevers or nightmares or lost teeth. It’s the first of my mother’s

attempts since the divorce to make an independent life for her-

self, a life that does not seem possible to her unless motherhood

is left behind” (Harrison 22). Harrison’s very existence is a

visceral reminder of the unceremonious end to her mother’s ado-

lescence. She works her way through a string of men, jobs, and

religions; when Harrison does manage to capture her attention,

she is met with resentment and the knowledge that she is merely a

distraction from her mother’s relentless pursuit of youth. Jung

writes: “We could therefore say that every mother contains her

daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and that every

woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her

daughter. This participation and intermingling give rise to that

peculiar uncertainty as regards time: a woman lives earlier as a

mother, later as a daughter” (Jung 188). In the Jungian view, the

mother-daughter relationship is therefore fundamentally an inter-

dependent one: just as the trajectory of Harrison’s mother’s life

is shaped by her experiences as a parent, she also irrevocably

preserves her own insecurities and neuroses within Harrison. By

modeling the puer aeturnus archetype throughout Harrison’s child-

hood, Harrison’s mother thus creates an environment ideally

suited to encouraging in Harrison the attributes of the eternal

child.

If Harrison’s tumultuous childhood primes her for this, then

her incestuous relationship with her father is certainly the cat-

alyst for her transformation into the puer aeturnus archetype. At

first, Harrison and her father both willingly seek each other out

to the detriment of their personal lives. Jung argues that “the

‘child' is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time

divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the

triumphal end” (Jung 179). Harrison certainly embodies this; she

has managed to finally channel the abandonment that blotted her

childhood into a victory over her mother when she steals the man

her mother has been fixated on for Harrison’s entire life. How-

ever, as the affair progresses, Harrison becomes completely iso-

lated from her former life by her father’s increasing emotional

and physical demands. Harrison is so consumed by the affair that

the traditional rites of passage, such as graduating college and

entering the workforce or maintaining her relationship with her

college boyfriend, become psychologically unattainable. Mean-

while, what began as a series of furtive encounters is now an

open secret in Harrison’s family, and her grandparents’ financial

assistance is what enables Harrison to escape adult responsibili-

ties by drifting haplessly through Europe while on leave from

college, and later to surrender further to the affair and its

psychological consequences in New York without the need to hold a

steady job. This culminates with Harrison relinquishing her last

fantasies of independent adult life as she moves in with her fa-

ther and stepmother. Harrison’s father is, in many ways, a puer

aeturnus in his own right, embodying the characteristic invinci-

bility of the archetype as he flaunts his affair before his wife

and his church. Harrison and her father, after all, are “locked

in the kind of sympathy for each other that only two people

spurned by the same woman could feel” (Harrison 83). Despite the

respectable facade he maintains, Harrison’s father is no less

emotionally juvenile than Harrison herself. With every adult fig-

ure in her life now either precipitating or enabling her immatu-

rity, Harrison has regressed fully into the role of an eternal

child, something she is all too aware of. At a therapist visit,

she confesses: “‘See, I never knew my father. I’m going through a

stage, like all little girls, just later than most.’” (Harrison

145). Harrison is dressed more provocatively than she ever has

before, and yet the affair has damaged her to the extent that she
is unable to conceal her emotional stuntedness from even herself.

Maybe a puer aeturnus is first forged in the crucible of a trau-

matic or neglectful childhood, but Harrison’s adult influences

were undoubtedly influential in solidifying the childlike psycho-

logical state she is trapped in during her twenties.

While Harrison’s childhood and adolescence shine a light on

her family’s role in her descent into the puer archetype, Harri-

son’s culpability is an even more complex question. It is only

when Harrison’s mother starts to suffer after her cancer diagno-

sis that Harrison makes the first step towards reconciliation and

cuts her hair, relinquishing that symbol of rebellion and youth-

ful sexuality. Harrison is certainly manipulated and abused, but

she is hardly blameless either: after all, Harrison only bows out

of the sexual rivalry she has been engaged in with her mother

since early adolescence when her mother becomes physically inca-

pable of competing. In the eyes of Jungian scholar Marie-Louise

von Franz, Harrison’s own responsibility is critical. She writes:

“If the person has a greater personality within—that is, a possi-

bility of growth—then a psychological disturbance will occur.

That is why we always say that a neurosis is in a way a positive

symptom. It shows that something wants to grow; it shows that

that person is not right in his or her present state and if the

growth is not accepted then it grows against you, at your ex-

pense, and produces what might be called negative individuation…

The inner possibility of growth in a person is a dangerous thing

because either you say yes to it and go ahead, or you are killed

by it. There is no other choice. It is a destiny which has to be

accepted” (von Franz 58). To von Franz, the process of self-actu-

alization must be driven from within; perhaps Harrison was set up

for failure by her equally immature parents, but her only hope of

identifying and progressing from the child archetype that has

dominated her life (a process Jungian scholars call individua-

tion) is to take control of her own life. Indeed, the affair

leaves Harrison suffering from such severe symptoms of depression

that she is nearly “killed by it”; but it is Harrison, too, who

presents her shorn ponytail to her mother, representing not just

the end of the affair but Harrison’s first step towards making

amends for her part in their antagonistic relationship. To this

end, a puer aeturnus is neither born nor made, but rather both at

once; and in Harrison’s case, the process of individuation is

likewise both a product of her family circumstances and her de-

sire to claw her way out of the clutches of her affair.

By the conclusion of the memoir, Harrison’s mother has died.

She has ended her relationship with her father, begun a success-

ful career, and started a family of her own. Can we conclude,

then, that Harrison has successfully overcome the legacy of the

puer aeturnus archetype? To Jung, Harrison’s traumatic mother-

daughter relationship will always be a part of her, a history she

will carry with her as she takes on a maternal role herself. At

this stage of her life, Harrison leaves us with only brief

glimpses of how she has adapted to motherhood. Thus, the question

of whether Harrison has managed to achieve self-actualization de-

spite her neglectful childhood and incestuous affair is inher-

ently an unanswerable one. But Harrison leaves us with hope,

writing: “I feel that at last she knows me, and I her. I feel us

stop hoping for a different daughter and a different mother”

(Harrison 209). von Franz argues that “what is genuine in a per-

son and what is naive like a child in them is the source of suf-

fering. Many grown-ups split off this part and thereby miss indi-

viduation, for only if one accepts it and the suffering it im-

poses on one, can the process on individuation go on”, and if

Harrison’s conclusion signifies anything, it is acceptance of the

role the mother-daughter relationship plays in both causing and

healing the suffering Harrison has carried with her since her

early childhood (von Franz 74). The Kiss is certainly a warped

coming-of-age narrative: it perverts every sacred rite and ritual

associated with the much-romanticized transition from adolescence

to adulthood, from the first kiss to the first apartment. Never-

theless, Harrison concludes her memoir with the mature reflec-

tions of a woman who is, at the very least, no longer “forever

young”.
 Works Cited

Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss. Random House, 1997.

Jung, C. G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Edited by Gerhard

Adler et al., vol. 9i, Routledge, 1991.

von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeturnus. Inner

City Books, 2000.