Senex is a style of life and thought characterised by a sense of time and history, a concern for order, a love of tradition, and a tendency toward the abstract and the regulated; it is rather heavy in tone and depressive in mood
Puer in contrast, focuses on the here and now; prefers experiment and adventure; looks to the future; wants to transcend laws and traditions; and is light, airy, idealistic, charming, and ephemeral. It raises the spirits, but it has a habit of crashing down.
Hillman recommends a paradoxical reconciliation of senex and puer in which one influences the other without domination. His own writing has this unusual quality of intense love of tradition accompanied by liberating turns of imagination; odd oxymoron, this unsettling juxtaposition of opposites
linked mentions for "Senex and puer in Hillman":
tempering of one by the other … the only redemption for either of a pair of opposites is the tempering of one by the other. Faust is redeemed by the love of Gretchen;
homunculus and euphorion Made by Wagner — a man the size of a thumb (the second appearance of the puer aeternis). In Faust’s second, less personal and brief marriage with
charioteer who gallops off at full speed The efforts of planning, reasoning, discipline, and heroic ventures would only further the emotional confusion , it is only in the realm of symbol
Selected Writings introduced by Thomas Moore Hillman - an artist of psychology Senex and puer in Hillman he uses intellect to fortify imagination, because it is image, imagination, and the