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1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about fantasy, science fiction and fairy tales. I’m Eric Molinsky. READING: All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!" This was all that passed between them on the subJect, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end. I want to read part of an obituary, which ran in the New York Times on February 27th, 1996. NYT: Dan Kiley, the psychologist whose 1983 book, "The Peter Pan Syndrome," became an international best seller died on Saturday in Tucson, Ariz. He was 54. According to the Times, he got the idea for the book – quote: NYT: …after noticing that, like the famous character in the James M. Barrie play, many of the troubled teen-age boys he treated had problems growing up and accepting adult responsibilities. It doesn’t mention that Jungian psychologists were actually way ahead of him on analyzing this phenomenon – but it doesn’t matter because when it comes to the Peter Pan syndrome, Kiley was patient zero. According the Times: NYT: Dr. Kiley freely admitted that he had been a Peter Pan. But even after his success, happiness continued to elude him, at least until he underwent what his agent called an emotional sea change. After his second divorce, Dr. Kiley moved from Chicago to Tucson and became deeply involved in meditation and Zen philosophy. That might have accounted for his newfound peace of mind, but his wife had a different explanation. "He stopped chasing young babes," she said, suggesting that her husband had found true happiness only after he met and married her three years ago, settling down in a blissful relationship with her and their Maltese dog, Shelly. 2 So this is a very different lesson than the one you’d get from the Steven Spielberg film, Hook. In that movie, Peter makes a mistake by kissing Wendy’s daughter – and he instantly grows up and becomes an adult – which is the worst thing that could ever happen to him. CLIP FROM HOOK As a Gen Xer, I grew up on Spielberg movies. I got the message loud and clear to hold on to my childhood as tightly as I can because being an adult sucks. But as a kid, I never liked Peter Pan, although I love the story now. KC: We’re always in this push me pull your relationship with children and childhood and our own childhood, which makes sense to me that you wouldn’t have been interested in it as a child but you’re much more interested as an adult. Karen Coats is a professor of literature at Illinois State University. She wrote a paper called “Child-Hating, Peter Pan in the context of Victorian Hatred.” She says to truly understand Peter Pan, we have to remember he was invented in a society where children were supposed to be seen, not heard. He embodies some of the worst qualities of children that we want to forget because they’re so cute. And it can be shocking when we come across that ugly part of kids that we think that we know. KC: The children that we invest so much love in and so much time and attention are very cavalier with our feelings, they don’t mean to be. It’s just that, there’s sort of this recognition at base we’re all very narcissistic, but then you have Peter Pan who is reared apart from human society, and just – he’s murderous, he’s selfish, he doesn’t play by the rules that keep the rest of us in check. Things like memory and morality and even truth, he doesn’t have to play by those rules, we do. We have to bear consequences of our actions. EM: And I think what’s so infuriating is he keeps forgetting, that he keeps forgetting things he did wrong, even people he loves and lost, it’s sort of inevitable and infuriating at the same time. KC: Exactly, exactly, because wouldn’t we love to be relieved of the responsibly of remembering the hurts that we have perpetrate on others -- he never talks about the fact that somebody hurts him, and that may be his biggest denial, and I think that gets played up in contemporary version of play, that Peter is a much 3 more sympathetic character because limiting his experience is this tragic loss that his mother didn’t love him enough to come seek him. READING: They all gathered round him in affright, so alarming was his agitation; and with a fine candor he told them what he had hitherto concealed. "Long ago," he said, "I thought like you that my mother would always keep the window open for me, so I stayed away for moons and moons and moons, and then flew back; but the window was barred, for mother had forgotten all about me, and there was another little boy sleeping in my bed." I am not sure that this was true, but Peter thought it was true; and it scared them. "Are you sure mothers are like that?" "Yes." So this was the truth about mothers. The toads! Still it is best to be careful; and no one knows so Quickly as a child when he should give in. "Wendy, let us go home," cried John and Michael together. "Yes," she said, clutching them. "Not to-night?" asked the lost boys bewildered. They knew in what they called their hearts that one can get on Quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can't. "At once," Wendy replied resolutely, for the horrible thought had come to her: "Perhaps mother is in half mourning by this time." This dread made her forgetful of what must be Peter's feelings, and she said to him rather sharply, "Peter, will you make the necessary arrangements?" "If you wish it," he replied, as coolly as if she had asked him to pass the nuts. Not so much as a sorry-to-lose-you between them! If she did not mind the parting, he was going to show her, was Peter, that neither did he. 4 But of course he cared very much; and he was so full of wrath against grown- ups, who, as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally Quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland that, every time you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them off vindictively as fast as possible. As an adult, I seriously can’t believe how much I feel bad for Captain Hook. I mean, I know he’s a murderous pirate, but how much would it suck to find a fountain of youth in your 30s, and then be surrounded by feral kids -- forever? KC: The adult has a set of memories that matter to him, he has, and in Captain Hook’s expression of form, when he dies even, he says his socks were right, his scarf was right, everything was right so it was okay to die because everything was right according to way he understood what good form was. This is why Captain Hook hates Peter because Peter enjoys himself. Captain Hook has the accepted the terms of society which all aim toward constraining your enjoyment. EM: As a villain, and as Peter’s opposite, Hook has so much of the trappings of somebody with manner and class, and has very adult clothes and the sort of handkerchiefs and pocket watches and the kind of things that only someone who has mastered adulthood would have it has no cache in Never Never Land. KC: Exactly. Listen to that word trappings, he is entrapped in his adult persona in ways that Peter is youth and joy and why wouldn’t you hate that? READING: What sort of form was Hook himself showing? Misguided man though he was, we may be glad, without sympathizing with him, that in the end he was true to the traditions of his race. The other boys were flying around him now, flouting, scornful; and he staggered about the deck striking up at them impotently, his mind was no longer with them; it was slouching in the playing fields of long ago, or being sent up [to the headmaster] for good, or watching the wall-game from a famous wall. And his shoes were right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his socks were right. James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell. Peter Pan had always been popular with kids but the Peter Pan that we think of, that we know, is really the one from the 1950s -- because the 5 Broadway musical and the Disney cartoon came out within a year of each other. And suddenly Peter Pan was kind of an American hero. KC: It was interesting to me is that in 1950s, when Jungian psychologists pick that up, the Peter Pan syndrome, the major statement of that was a book called The Problem of Puer Aeternus – the men who won’t grow up basically.

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