Puer aeternusPuer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young;
psychologically, it is an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape.
He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable..............
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung developed a school of thought called analytical psychology, distinguishing it from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud . In analytical psychology (often called "Jungian psychology") the puer aeternus is an example of what Jung called an archetype, one of the "primordial, structural elements of the human psyche".
The shadow of the puer is the senex (Latin for "old man"), associated with the god Cronus—disciplined, controlled, responsible, rational, ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication, whimsy.
Like all archetypes, the puer is bi-polar, exhibiting both a "positive" and a "negative" aspect. The "positive" side of the puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future.
He also foreshadows the hero that he sometimes becomes (e.g. Heracles). The "negative" side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems.
"For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about....
The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puer_aeternus