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This paper is really two papers in one. The first paper is about the puer and the challenges of adolescence. The second one is an exposition of classical Jungian thought about midlife. The two themes lie awkwardly next to each other within the text. The more interesting part of the paper is the section on the puer. Unfortunately after making some suggestive observations Bortz does not develop the potential of this theme.
Bortz begins by calling to mind a scene from the film, Cabaret, in which a young man, a member of the Hitler Youth, is singing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’. Bortz describes the song as ‘the puer anthem’. This had been a favourite film in his youth, but he felt disturbed watching the film again with his adolescent son. The film serves as a jumping off point for Bortz's own imaginative construction of the future trajectory of the young man in the film. He sees him as a type whose ‘total identity is given over to that movement’ and for whom ‘the feminine side is missing’. The young man has ‘numerous schisms [that] compromise the very essence of his being’. The puer is dangerous because he is certain that he is right. He is one-sidedly identified with the ‘vertical plane of being’. The young man of Bortz's imagination is ‘caught up in a misguided logos of masculine spiritual energy’.
In the next section of the paper Bortz asks, ‘If schisms lead to a dehumanization process, what makes us human?’ His answer is to call on the rather austere witness of Levinas. He moves, by sleight of hand, from Levinas's infinite demand of the other to an ethic based on acceptance of all the energies inside our psyche. There follows a long section on Apollo, Dionysus and Hermes. He cites Hillman, Stein and Neumann. It is a fairly straight rendition of classical Jungian theory of the challenges of midlife. It is not clear in what way it is meant to address the problem of the dangerous puer. Having brought Hillman into the mix, Bortz neglects to make any reference to the puer-sene