The woman is not yet what is really wanted
Generally, great difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social situation.
In some cases, there is a kind of asocial individualism: being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on.
In addition, an arrogant attitude arises towards other people, due to both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority.
Such people usually have great difficulty in finding the right kind of job, for whatever they find is never quite right or quite what they wanted. There is always “a hair in the soup.”
The woman is never quite the right woman; she is nice as a girl friend, but . . . There is always a “but” which prevents marriage or any kind of commitment.
This all leads to a form of neurosis which II. G. Baynes has described as the “provisional life”; that is, the strange attitude and feeling that the woman is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.
If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment.
Accompanying this neurosis is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior or Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; that the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found.
This can progress to a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one’s time “has not yet come.”
The one situation dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatsoever.
There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the specific human being that one is.
There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again.
Every just-so situation is hell.
At the same time, there is something highly symbolic—namely, a fascination for dangerous sports, particularly flying and mountaineering—so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism of which is to get away from the mother; i.e., from the— Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 2
