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Psychodynamic Practice: Individuals, Groups and Organisations


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Peter Pan and the flight from reality: A tale of narcissism, nostalgia and narrative trespass
Nell Boulton Published online: 23 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Nell Boulton (2006) Peter Pan and the flight from reality: A tale of narcissism, nostalgia and narrative trespass, Psychodynamic Practice: Individuals, Groups and Organisations, 12:3, 307-317, DOI: 10.1080/14753630600765709 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753630600765709

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Psychodynamic Practice, August 2006; 12(3): 307 317

Student Essay Competition Winner

Peter Pan and the ight from reality: A tale of narcissism, nostalgia and narrative trespass
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NELL BOULTON

Abstract It is argued that J. M. Barries Neverland represents a latency phantasy of ight to a world apart from that of adults, in which there is scope for both a denial of, and a tentative exploration of, the coming realities of adolescence. Celebrated for his ability to stay a boy forever, Peter Pan can be understood as a character who embodies the narcissistic need of some individuals to retreat from the realities of the adult world. Reactions to Peter Pan have been curiously divided, and it is suggested that this split can be understood in terms of Barries highly ambivalent attitude towards childhood in which sentimental nostalgia quickly turns to bitterness and a sense of exclusion from the maternal object.

Keywords: Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie, latency, Oedipal, omnipotence, narcissism, perversion.

In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality (Freud, 1915, p. 275). Introduction Since his rst appearance (in Barries 1902 novel The little white bird, followed by the 1904 play Peter Pan1 and the 1911 childrens story Peter and Wendy), Peter Pan has developed a curiously divided reputation. On the one hand, he has been recognized as one of the immortals of literature (Carpenter, 1985, p. 176), a symbol, even archetype, of eternal childhood and innocence. On the other, his tale has been regarded as morally suspect, even verging on the abusive.
Correspondence: Nell Boulton, 39 Pagent Road, St Albans, Herts, AL1 1NB. E-mail: eleanor.boulton@hpt.nhs.uk ISSN 1475-3634 print/ISSN 1475-3626 online 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14753630600765709

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A journalist has written in The Times recently (in a tone which seems to mingle condemnation with a certain salacious pleasure) that Barries play reads like the work of a man determined to cram into one seemingly innocent night in the theatre every titillating xation and fetish to be found in Sigmund Freuds casebook (Morrison, 2004). Another critic (Rose, 1994) has expressed a serious note of concern that the authorial voice in Peter and Wendy is guilty of an act of narrative molestation. Similarly, re-tellings of Barries own history have tended to either idealize (as in last years lm Finding Neverland) or make much darker readings (as in Birkins 1979 television series The Lost Boys2). Finding Neverland transforms Barrie into a romanticized Hollywood heart-throb (played by Johnny Depp), and tells the story of his close relationship with Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies, the mother of the boys on whom he based Peter Pan and the Darling brothers. The lm conveniently rewrites history by killing off John Lewellyn-Davies (father of the boys and husband to Sylvia) before Sylvia and Barrie meet, thus avoiding any awkward implications of adultery. Sylvia (Kate Winslet) and Barrie are thus portrayed as an idealized romanticised couple (although the psychoanalytic observer may detect more than a hint of the Oedipal in an arrangement which kills off the father leaving Barrie alone with the mother). This paper considers the reasons for the lasting appeal of the story of Peter Pan in terms of its ability to tap into universal dilemmas about coping with the realities of life as well as exploring the more perverse elements of Barries vision. The latency world of Neverland A decade before Freud produced his functional theory of the mind, J. M. Barrie was engaged in a not dissimilar enterprise to map out the mind of the child, which he envisaged in terms of the imaginative territory of Neverland: I dont know whether you have ever seen a map of a persons mind . . . There are zigzag lines on it . . . and these are probably roads in the island; for Neverland is always more or less an island, with . . . coral reefs and . . . savages, and lonely lairs . . . It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is also rst day at school, religion, fathers . . . needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding (Barrie, 1911, p. 73). The passage offers a striking description of the way in which the childs inner world is an odd jumble of pleasurable, primitive instincts on the one hand (what Freud calls the id) and symbols of authority and conformity on

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the other (calling to mind the superego). On such an island, we can speculate that the egos task of substituting the reality principle for the pleasure principle (Freud, 1923, p. 25) in other words of taking account of the demands of the external world rather than operating by instinct alone will never be straightforward. For Wendy, Michael and John Darling, and perhaps for the child-reader of Barries tale, Neverland offers a retreat that exists alongside yet separate from the more ordinary existence of home. As Waddell (1998, p. 96) has suggested, the desire to develop a world apart, a world of ones own, separate and yet not cut-off from that of the adults is increasingly powerful in latency. However, crucial to such an idea is the option of returning home at will. After running away with Peter to Neverland, the children are shocked to learn that Peter himself once attempted to return to his mother, but found the nursery window barred against him and another little boy lying in his bed. Peters cautionary tale is a reminder that the ight to Neverland is desirable only in so far as it is temporary. Like the period of latency itself, Neverland is a place where issues such as sexuality are rarely directly tackled, but are hinted at as part of the Darling childrens experiences. Their ight to Neverland is described in ecstatic terms reminiscent of Freuds idea (1900) that dreams of ying represent wish-fullment phantasies of sexual pleasure. However, as Wendy discovers, ying can be dangerous. Her ight exposes her to the sexual jealousy of Tinkerbell, who encourages one of the lost boys to shoot her down. Famous for his cockiness, Peter is a charismatic gure who seems to typify the latency childs sense of certainty a quality which, as Wilson (1989) has reminded us, is indicative of the childs need to defend against the fear of uncertainty that adolescence will bring. Peters is an omnipotent world, in which he can y, talk to mermaids, defeat pirates, rule his band of lost boys, and set Wendy to darn his stockings. During a scene where the fairy Tinkerbell has been poisoned, Peter even extends his sense of omnipotence to the children in the audience, who are invited literally to take life into their own hands as they clap out their belief in fairies and thus revive her. As an eternal child, Peter is exempt not only from a developing sexuality, but also from the ordinary realities of time and ageing. He takes a sadistic pleasure in thinning out his band of lost boys when they seem to grow up (Barrie, 1911, p. 112), and sees death not as a disturbing fact of life, but as an awfully big adventure (Barrie, 1911, p. 152). With his qualities of omnipotent condence, distaste for sexuality, and desire to never grow up, Peter Pan can be said to speak to the part of the latency child that wishes to defend against the unpalatable realities of adult life. The difference between the ordinary latency child and Peter, however, is that for Peter there can be no development.

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The question of why Barrie should have chosen to create a character who never moves beyond latency can in part be understood in terms of Barries own childhood experiences. When Barrie was 6 years old his older brother David always felt to have been his mothers favourite died in a skating accident aged 13 years. While his mother mourned David and drew comfort from the fact that in dying he would remain a boy forever (Birkin, 1979, p. 5), Barrie reacted jealously to the way in which David was taking up his mothers attentions, and did all he could to imitate David and regain his mothers love. It is possible to speculate that the lasting effect of this episode for Barrie was an unconscious assumption that the only way to maintain his mothers affections was to evade the ordinary realities of ageing and remain a boy forever. Such biographical details remind us that the gure of Peter Pan is the particular product of Barries disturbed childhood. However, I would argue that it is also possible to understand Peter in broader terms, as one who, in his desire to deny the realities of the adult world, represents the ultimate, archetypal narcissist. Narcissism and the retreat from reality Key to Peters story is his sudden barring from the nursery and abandonment by his mother while he watches another little boy sleeping in his bed. It is interesting to compare such a scenario to Freuds 1909 case study of Little Hans, whose hitherto blissfully uninterrupted union with his mother is shattered by the arrival of a sister, evoking suspicions of his parents sexual union. Hans begins to experience unconscious anger towards a father who in phantasy he now perceives as a rival for his mothers affections, and he fears that his father will punish him for his rivalrous thoughts. Hanss aggressive feelings towards his father take the form of oral-sadistic urges to bite off his fathers penis, but are repressed and unconsciously projected on to horses he sees in the streets, which he fears will bite him. Peter Pans experience of suddenly being expelled from a mothers love seems to suggest the shock of an abrupt weaning or, as in the case of Little Hans, the trauma of being replaced in the mothers affections by a new baby whose existence is evidence of a parental sexual union. Peters difculties in coming to terms with the primal scene can be seen in his failure to understand or respond to Wendys experimental irtations. For him, natural sexual curiosity is impossible. Indeed, Peters lack of curiosity does not merely relate to sexuality, but extends to an inability to understand the points of view of other people. Whether commanding the lost boys or asking Wendy to mother him, he seems to treat everyone in Neverland as narcissistic extensions of his own needs.

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Interestingly, Peter seems unable to think about mothers except in the most divided, paranoid-schizoid terms. While on the one hand encouraging Wendy to act as an idealized mother gure who tends to his every need, Peter is full of bitterness and anger towards his birth mother. As Kissel (1988) has noted, such a dichotomy, between the mother longed for and the mother who in phantasy one wants to kill, is strikingly summed up in a remark made by Tootles, one of the lost boys, who comments after accidentally shooting down Wendy:

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When ladies used to come to me in dreams, I said, pretty mother, pretty mother. But when at last she really came, I shot her (Barrie, 1911, p. 124). Like Hanss experience of being haunted by vengeful, biting horse-gures, Peter constantly anticipates revenge attacks in Neverland. His experience here can usefully be understood in terms of Kleins comment that, where an infants sense of the dangerousness of his own aggression remains unmitigated by a loving object, such hostile impulses are transformed into injured and retaliating gures which threaten him with the same sadistic attacks as he commits against his parents in phantasy (Klein, 1945, p. 66). For Peter, the physically damaged and persistently vengeful gure of Captain Hook is a particularly potent symbol. Conventionally played by the same actor who plays the childrens father Mr Darling, Hook can be said to represent the darker side of paternity. Indeed, Hooks attempts to take Wendy as his mother suggest the profoundly Oedipal nature of the struggle in which he and Peter are engaged. In this context, Peters act of cutting off Hooks arm and throwing it to a passing crocodile can be understood as a desire to castrate Hook (in an oral-sadistic gesture reminiscent of Little Hanss projected desire to bite off his fathers genitals). Despite Hooks reputation as a fearsome opponent, he at times degenerates into a gure of ridicule and impotence. In the nal denouement after being tricked by Peter, he is described in terms which seem to make direct reference to his loss of manhood as being as impotent as he was damp, and like a cut ower (Barrie, 1911, p. 190). Similarly, his alter ego Mr Darling becomes a gure of ridicule and disappointment when he moves into Nannas kennel literally the doghouse after the escape of the children to Neverland. In portraying such weak, symbolically castrated male role models, Barrie seems to be suggesting that it is better to remain a boy, safe from the fray of adult male sexuality, than to risk the humiliation of impotence. In Freudian theory, the resolution of the Oedipus complex for a boy occurs when he is able to identify with an admired and potent father gure (thus achieving the important developmental milestone of moving beyond the desire to be his

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father, to a more mature state of wanting to be like him). For Peter, however, such progress seems impossible, in a world devoid of admirable masculine gures. Peters refusal to grow up, and his dismissal of death as nothing more than an awfully big adventure, can be understood as a powerful manic defence against such humiliation. Indeed, Hooks nal gruesome death (in the jaws of a crocodile whose clock has nally stopped) is a reminder of what Peter is ultimately trying to defend against the terrifying notion that death will catch up with us all one day. I would suggest that Peters early inability to internalize a benign maternal object has had an impact not only on his avoidance of the realities of sex and death, but on his ability to symbolize. His notion that make believe and true [are] exactly the same thing (Barrie, 1911, p. 128) shown for example when he serves pretend food to the Darling children and is as satised as if the food were real indicates a disturbance in his ability to distinguish between the idea of a thing and the thing itself. Segal (1957, pp. 391 397) has argued that difculties in the capacity to symbolize that is to distinguish between an object and what it represents are a result of disturbances in the differentiation between ego and object in early infancy. An infant who internalizes a secure caregiving object will develop an awareness of the separateness between ego and object and will go on to use symbols as a healthy means to overcome loss (Segal, 1957, p. 166). As with Peter, however, individuals whose identity and ego have not been so securely established can come to confuse symbol and object in an unconscious attempt to avoid the painful task of mourning. Peters psychic retreat Steiners (1993) observations about some of his most difcult psychotherapy patients, and their problematic relationship with reality, seem highly relevant to Peter Pans situation. Steiner suggests that such individuals retire into a mental space or psychic retreat in an attempt to avoid facing the realities of adult life including relationships, sexuality and the inevitability of time and death. These patients often feel they have been prematurely and cruelly pushed out of [the] maternal space (Steiner, 1993, p. 53) and are unable to cope with difculties which lie in the way of mourning the loss that must be experienced when they separate from their primitively conceived internal objects (Steiner, 1993, p. ix). Steiner postulates that such individuals have developed a perverse relationship with reality. Broadening the term beyond its original implications of deviant sexuality, he describes such perversion in terms of the state of mind where reality is simultaneously accepted and disavowed (Steiner, 1993, p. 99).

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In this light, it is possible to see Peter as existing in a Neverland psychic retreat which both acknowledges and denies the realities of sexuality, time and death. In creating a gure exempt from time yet doomed to watch his friends grow up, who longs for and yet despises all mothers, and who is unable to come to terms with death except as an awfully big adventure, Barrie can be said to have created the ultimate perverse character. Steiner notes that individuals who make use of psychic retreats have often become so mentally depleted as to have virtually lost a sense of personal identity. Such people, he suggests, operate at a primitive, narcissistic level, in which emotions and parts of the self are split off from the ego and evacuated into others, in particular during the unconscious mechanism of projective identication. Unable to separate from primitively conceived objects, such individuals evade the important task of mourning dened by Steiner as the process of regaining parts of the self which have been projected into others (Steiner, 1993, p. 9). As a result, such people can end up in a psychic nomans-land, in which they feel neither fully sane nor quite mad, neither completely male nor quite female, neither children nor adults . . . but existing on a borderline between these conditions (Steiner, 1993, p. 52). I would argue that Peter Pans split view of the world, and his narcissistic tendency to treat others as extensions of his own needs, have left him mentally depleted and fragmented, and living in such a borderline, marginal state. Neither ordinary child nor grown-up, he is an androgynous gure exempt from time and sexuality who, as the literary critic Hollindale has argued, is free to play an enticing variety of roles, but in the end his freedom is the freedom to be nothing (Hollindale, 1991, p. x). Case study Neverlands lasting appeal as a psychic retreat is vividly illustrated in the case of a young woman (Sarah3) who, 6 weeks after giving birth to her rst child through emergency Caesarean, claimed to be Peter Pan, and talked about suicide as a means of getting to Neverland to be with Wendy. She showed no interest in her baby, instead leaving her mother to take care of him. A male psychiatrist who visited noted that Sarah had regressed to a state where she needed help with personal care from her mother. However, Sarah was alarmed by the psychiatrist, insisting that he was Captain Hook and that crocodiles had bitten off his hand. She believed that he had been present at the hospital during her Caesarean, and accused him of trying to kill her. She also indicated that voices were telling her to walk in front of trafc in order to die and get back to Neverland, maintaining that such a death would not hurt. When asked whether she would have regrets about leaving her baby, she replied that she would rather be with Wendy. Sarah was diagnosed with a puerperal psychosis, and for several weeks refused to answer to any name other than Peter. Her psychotic

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identication with Peter Pan can be understood as an unconscious attempt to retreat from the painful realities of her life. Like Little Hans, her illness provided her with a secondary gain, in the form of further dependence on her own mother. We can speculate that the demands of a new baby may have evoked in Sarah baby-like feelings of vulnerability alongside anxieties about taking on a responsible adult role. Her inability to understand the nality or physical pain of death, and her idea that suicide is simply a way of getting to Neverland, strikingly echo Peters manically defensive view of death as a big adventure.

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Nostalgia and narrative trespass Barries boy who would not grow up has provoked strikingly divided responses. In the popular imagination, Peter Pan holds the status of the archetypal innocent, loved by children for the challenge he offers to the adult world, or nostalgically remembered by adults mourning the loss of their own childhoods. For others, however, it has become fashionable to refer to Barries creation in cynical, knowing tones as seen in a recent newspaper article which describes Peter Pan as an attempt to titillate and a paedophile nightmare (Morrison, 2004). Interestingly, such a divided response between sentimental nostalgia and sardonic criticism is echoed in the shifting tones of Barries narratal voice in Peter and Wendy (1911). In the following passage, Barrie takes on the persona of the wistful adult describing a childhood to which he can never return: On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more (Barrie, 1911, p. 74). However, an altogether more bitter, even spiteful tone, is apparent in a passage where he is considering Mrs Darling waiting at home for the children: as we are here we may as well stay and look on. That is all we are, lookerson. Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt (Barrie, 1911, p. 208). In psychoanalytic terms, Barries swing from an attitude of wistful longing for childhood to one of bitter, spiteful regret, can be said to illustrate the necessarily divided nature of nostalgia a state of mind whose origins can be traced back to the infants early relationship with the breast. As commentators such as Waddell (1998, p. 64) have argued, the infants original experience of nostalgia occurs at the developmentally crucial stage of weaning, in which the infant experiences feelings of loss and sadness, of

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nostalgia for a state of being which can never be home in quite the same way again. Kleins theories (1957) suggest that, where an infant has failed to internalize a benign maternal object who mitigates the infants experience of abandonment, the infant can be overwhelmed with feelings of anger towards a breast which is perceived in phantasy as keeping good things for itself. Indeed, Klein has postulated that such hostile feelings towards the breast are the origins of envy, and a related desire on the part of the infant to spoil the object. I would argue that Barries apparent difculties in experiencing nostalgia except in the context of overwhelming frustration, can be understood in similarly infantile terms. As a bitter, spiteful looker-on, excluded from childhood pleasures (and, by implication, from the love of a mother such as Mrs Darling), he seems to have taken on the envious, spoiling impulses of one impelled to ruin for others the pleasures he cannot enjoy for himself. Interestingly, Barries status as looker-on who ts in with neither children nor adults can be said to resemble that of a voyeur. Dened by Freud (1910) as a perversion, the concept of voyeurism can be understood as relating to the phantasy of denying ones exclusion from a couple relationship (originally the primal scene) through the phantasy of control over what is being observed (Rycroft, 1995, p. 195). Like a child who is unable to accept his separateness from his parents intercourse, therefore, Barrie remains forever barred from the joys of the relationships which he feels compelled to spy on. At times using a conspiratorial we in which he includes himself amongst the children (Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are [Barrie, 1911, p. 166]), and at other times locating himself with the excluded adults (We shall land there no more [Barrie, 1911, p. 74]), Barrie seems to occupy a developmental and narcissistic hinterland similar to that of Peter Pan himself. For some critics, such an ability to move between child and adult worlds is profoundly disturbing. Rose (1994, p. 70) has argued that Barrie violates the unspoken rule of childrens literature, which dictates that certain psychic barriers go undisturbed, the most important of which is the barrier between adult and child, and goes on to assert that Barries story therefore represents an act of narrative molestation. Hollindale (1991, p. xxv) puts the case less sensationally when he argues that Peter and Wendy involves an act of narrative trespass . . . into emotional terrain which ought to be untouched. That Barries work is being discussed by literary critics in such terms is perhaps indicative of the high levels of societal anxiety about what constitutes appropriate behaviour towards children, in the context of recent revelations about the extent of childhood sexual abuse. Indeed, as Rose (1994) has argued, the myth of a sexually innocent Peter Pan becomes all the

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more potent, in a society which tends to deny the complex nature of childhood sexuality, and believes that the only credible child abuse victim is a de-sexualised one. Indeed, the appropriation of Barries story by Michael Jackson who famously named his ranch Neverland and was alleged to have engaged in sexual abuse of children there is a chilling reminder of the way in which the developmental issues and conicts the tale throws up can be misused and exploited. I would not go so far as to say that Barries story constitutes an act of narrative molestation. Indeed, I would suggest that some of the emotional terrain that modern critics have found so shocking including the power of infantile drives and of Oedipal feelings has turned out to be the very same ground from which Freud unearthed his psychoanalytic discoveries a century ago. Indeed, I would suggest that the polarization of Peter Pans image into either idealized child on the one hand, or the product of a morally suspect sexual deviant on the other resembles a process of unconscious splitting. By maintaining these extreme versions of Peter as ultimate childhood innocent or paedophile nightmare there is an attempt to deny the complex nature of childhood sexuality, and to absolve adults of guilt by locating this rmly with marginal, pathologized gures. Conclusion In creating Neverland, Barrie can be said to have unconsciously tapped into the desire of the latency child to separate from the adult world and its unpalatable realities a desire which nds its most extreme expression in the gure of Peter Pan. While Peters relationship with reality can in many ways be described as pathologically distorted and perverse, I would suggest that Barries tale owes its popularity to an ability to tackle universal issues which must be grappled with by all of us as we move through life. The questions his work raises about how far it is possible to mourn the loss of maternal objects and come to terms with ones own mortality are crucial to the process of reworking the anxieties of the depressive position a task which, as Klein has reminded us, does not merely end with infancy, but continues throughout life. Perhaps one of Peter Pans most interesting reincarnations has been his use to raise money for the Great Ormond Street Childrens Hospital. Barries 1929 legacy leaving the royalties of Peter Pan to the hospital can on one level be understood as a simple act of generosity and goodwill towards children. However, it is also possible to view the legacy as serving an important unconscious purpose for Barrie. We can speculate that the man who felt such an urge to say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt (Barrie, 1911, p. 208) may also have experienced an opposing drive to repair in phantasy that which he had damaged.

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For me, however, there remains a third, more convincing, way of thinking about Barries legacy. His act of generosity towards the childrens hospital can be understood as his nal and greatest manic defence: in which Peter Pan the eternal, immortal child becomes the ultimate symbol of the ght against death. Notes 1 Performed for the rst time in 1904, the play Peter Pan was not published until 1928. 2 Birkin followed this up in 1979 with a book, JM Barrie and The Lost Boys, tracing Barries relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys. 3 Names have been changed.

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