This week I was offered a radical new perspective on one of my favorite book which I used to read to my sons when they were little. I’m still destabilized by it! The solitary universe of Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a desertic planet where the vegetation has almost disappeared except for a huge baobab tree threatening to devor the planet itself, according to Marie-Louise Von Franz ( Jung’s precious collaborator), translates the author’s interior loneliness and his thirst for feelings.
Marie-Louise Von Franz shows how the giant baobab devouring the planet the Little Prince expresses how the author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was actually prisoner of a maternal complex.
Marie-Louise Von Franz has devoted a whole book to the problem of eternal youth. In this book she invites us to reflect on the imaginary world of Le Petit Prince. This book is called Puer Aeternus, Latin for << eternal youth>> and also the name of a very ancient god who possessed the ability to be reborn to infinity.
According to Marie-Louie Von Franz, the famous drawing of a boa who has swallowed an elephant (and that adults mistake for the representation of a hat) is a clear sign indicating that the heroic ego de Saint-Exupéry, symbolized by the elephant (animal that is worshiped for his strength and wisdom), was swallowed by the mother. Saint-Exupéry represents the mother in the guise of boa choking his victim. Apparently Saint-Exupéry had a very strong and energetic mother ….
More broadly, according to Guy Corneau, the life and oeuvre of Saint-Exupéry raises the crucial question: how to live one’s creativity in adulthood; how to become adults while maintaining the vitality and the wondering capacity of a child?
All the ideas mentioned above come from Guy Corneau’s book Père manquant fils manqué Que sont les hommes devenus? I’m reading right now. I find it to be a fascinating reading on the father-mother -son triangle, he construction of masculinity and feminity and much more.