Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analyses of American Media, by Sally Porterfield, Keith Polette, Tita French Baumlin

By Sally Porterfield, Keith Polette, Tita French Baumlin
Explores the arrested improvement of yank culture.
Arguing that American tradition appeals to and is populated by way of little ones and children who basically seem to be grownup women and men, the essays in Perpetual Adolescence research the Jungian archetype of the “eternal youth”—the puer aeternus—as it's manifested within the arrested improvement of yank tradition. From the infantilization of the American psyche and the lionization of teenaged celebrities and our bodies, to fanatical conformity, and puerile leisure, the individuals probe the quite a few ways in which American tv, track, movie, print, net, schooling, and social hobbies paintings to nourish and maintain this baby archetype. delivering analytic psychology as an device of social research and critique, they element to the necessity for discussion over the reasons and results of our puer-fixations, that have turn into, in huge half, either a production and a writer of the yankee zeitgeist.
“The fourteen essays in Perpetual Adolescence each one stand all alone as vital contributions to knowing the archetype of the everlasting baby in Western pop culture … Perpetual Adolescence is a well timed, provocative, and sobering exam of the endemic affliction and pandemic effects of mass-mindedness ‘driven by means of archetypes.’” — Spring
"This compelling research of why visions of endless adolescence are so compelling in modern media promises an exceptional, Jungian deconstruction of father culture." — CHOICE
“Perpetual Adolescence is an interesting research of 1 of Jung’s such a lot vital archetypes, that of the puer aeternus, which suggests arrested improvement instead of everlasting formative years. ceaselessly fascinating, this ebook is certainly interdisciplinary and should attract these attracted to cultural reports, movie stories, environmental reports, and mythic criticism.” — Jeffrey Berman, writer of Death within the lecture room: Writing approximately Love and Loss