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 does not look to current events for the answer, but to 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 Jung’s analytical psychology, the puer aeternus is the figure who refuses to settle into the limitations of adult life: a fixed identity, a body with boundaries, and the passage of time. Peter Pan is its best-known literary embodiment—the child who never grows older, in a Neverland about which Alderman quotes the telling line: "In Neverland, to make-believe something is to make it true." Alderman emphasizes 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. According to him, whenever an archetype emerges, it is a signal—not a literal claim about the truth of the world, but a symbolic message about something that is calling for attention.

Postmodernism as Dissociation

A central point in Alderman’s analysis is the relationship between gender ideology and the postmodernist thinking from which it emerges. 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 seeing biological sex as something arbitrary, something that could just as easily have been constructed differently. The limits of self-identification are explored in more detail on genderid.nl.

The Body as a Boundary That Makes Growth Possible

Against this dissociation, Alderman places a core 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 these, rather than rationalizing them away, is precisely what enables someone to mature psychologically. According to him, a culture that treats biology as an arbitrary construct 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 offered resistance—it was genuine rebellion against genuine authority. Today’s identity movement, by contrast, enjoys extensive institutional support, unlike, for example, 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 the very adult institutions that would normally be expected to set boundaries. This makes the dynamic harder to break through than earlier generational conflicts, Alderman argues: there is no longer any resistance to push against, and therefore no clear point at which further personal development is required.

What This Perspective Adds

Alderman’s analysis does not claim to explain why any particular 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 bodily limitation and its belief 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 who struggle with it, but as an additional layer for understanding the phenomenon. Clinical psychologist Joe Burgo offers a related psychological reading in the article about boys and masculinity.