The Eternal Boy: What a Jungian Perspective Reveals About Gender Ideology

Why is the idea that an inner identity takes precedence over biological sex gaining such traction right now? American clinical psychologist Bret Alderman looks for the answer not in current events, but in the depth psychology of Carl Jung. In an interview with the American newsletter gender:hacked, he describes trans-identification as a contemporary manifestation of an archetype that has appeared in myths and fairy tales for centuries: the puer aeternus, the eternal boy.

The Archetype of the Eternal Boy

In Jungian analytical psychology, the puer aeternus is the figure who refuses to settle into the limitations of adult existence: a fixed identity, a body with boundaries, the passage of time. Peter Pan is its best-known literary embodiment—the child who never grows older, in Neverland, of which Alderman quotes the telling line: "In Neverland, to make-believe something is to make it true." Alderman stresses that he does not use this archetype to dismiss trans-identification as unreal, but to understand what the psyche is trying to communicate through it. In his view, when an archetype emerges, it is always a signal—not a literal claim about the truth of the world, but a symbolic message about something demanding attention.

Postmodernism as Dissociation

A central point in Alderman's analysis is the relationship between gender ideology and the postmodernist thinking from which it emerged. In his view, deconstruction and gender theory are not merely philosophical movements, but intellectual expressions of a psychological dissociation: an inner split in which representation—the story someone tells about themselves—takes the place of embodied reality. When language and self-image become more important than the body itself, Alderman argues, room emerges for biological sex to be seen as arbitrary, as something that could just as easily have been constructed differently.

The Body as a Boundary That Makes Growth Possible

Against that dissociation, Alderman places a central idea from the Jungian tradition: psychological maturity begins with accepting embodiment and the natural boundaries that come with it. A body has a sex, an age, and limitations—and accepting those things, rather than reasoning them away, is precisely what enables a person to mature psychologically. A culture that treats biology as an arbitrary construct, he argues, deprives itself of one of the most important anchors for that maturation.

A Paradox: Rebellion with Institutional Blessing

What makes this era unique, according to Alderman, is a paradox. Earlier youth movements that opposed the established order did so precisely because that order resisted them—it was genuine rebellion against genuine authority. Today's identity movement, by contrast, enjoys extensive institutional support, unlike, say, the countercultures of the 1960s: from schools, the media, and government policy. An impulse that is archetypically driven by resistance to limitation is thus reinforced by those same adult institutions that would normally be expected to set boundaries. According to Alderman, this makes the dynamic harder to break than earlier generational conflicts: there is no longer any resistance to push against, and therefore no clear point at which one's development must move forward.

What This Perspective Adds

Alderman's analysis does not claim to explain why any individual person identifies as trans—for that, clinical care and attention to the individual remain necessary. It does, however, offer an explanatory framework for the broader cultural phenomenon: why this particular era, with its distrust of physical limitation and its faith in self-chosen identity, provides such fertile ground for the idea that who you are is separate from what your body is. That is precisely the kind of qualification generally missing from the prevailing, affirmative narrative about gender—not as an attack on those struggling with it, but as an additional layer for understanding the phenomenon.