5/7/2023 0 Comments Never grow up song peter pan![]() “Chances are, what drew you to someone with Peter Pan syndrome was their lightheartedness, love for life, and sense of adventure.” “This can actually have some strengths to it,” says Lauren Cook, PsyD, a therapist based in Los Angeles, California. In fact, some of these traits may be endearing to you. Barrie is making out that tiny children are more animal-like,” she told the Guardian.You fell in love for a reason. In those days, they thought of children as being tiny people with no knowledge, that all you had to do was educate them. So he’s personally motivated, but is also scientifically motivated. “A lot of it is to do with reshaping his childhood. ![]() Ridley said that the tale of a boy who never grows up is also linked to Barrie’s tragic childhood: the author’s elder brother died in a skating accident when he was a child. The stories of Peter Pan were created by Barrie between 18, to amuse the boys of the Llewelyn Davies family, whom Barrie had met while walking in Kensington Gardens, and whose guardian he later became when their parents died. He must have known it was weird, and interesting, and that it meant something. A little version of appears two to three times. Some of the quirky whimsicalities appear more than once: he seems to be making a point. “I’ve thought a great deal about what his motivation was, and I’m convinced he was doing it on purpose. I think Barrie is completely suffused with this,” she said. And then along came Darwin, showing us that we were animals mentally as well as physically. “At that time, animals were thought of as beasts, there was a big gap between humans and animals. She concluded that the work of Charles Darwin had been a pivotal influence on Barrie’s work. “I read up about it, and although there was a lot about Peter Pan, who’s an iconic figure, and people talked about Barrie’s interest in children, I really found very little about cognitive psychology.” “As a modern psychologist, I could see things in it that I knew hadn’t been ‘discovered’ until I was a student, or in the 1980s. Ridley told the Guardian that, on reading Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens as an adult and applying her academic experience as a neuroscientist, she found Barrie’s prescience “quite extraordinary”. ![]() He was very forward thinking in this respect and much of his motivation seems to have been a plea for a greater understanding of the mental and emotional needs of children.”Ĭognitive psychology, she writes, was in its infancy when Barrie was writing, and “in many cases, his accurate observation of animal and human behaviour precedes the analysis of these behaviours by the scientific community”.Ĭalling Barrie a “naturalist of the mind”, she shows how he explores the nature of consciousness, from closely observed details about human behaviour such as contagious yawning (Wendy’s “light blinked and gave such a yawn that the other two yawned also”), to the important role of sleep in consolidating and rationalising memory, which Barrie compares to “tidying drawers”: “When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.” As a modern psychologist, I could see things that I knew hadn’t been ‘discovered’ until the 1980s. ![]() He is demonstrating that children need to develop cognitively, that is to say, they need to acquire skills of thinking, rather than that they are little adults who need merely to acquire factual information in order to grow up. “Barrie’s whimsicalities serve to compare the cognitive abilities of babies, children, and fairies (who represent children’s imagination) to those of adult humans. “These whimsical ideas comprise deliberate errors of cognition, that is to say, errors in the way we normally structure our thoughts, leading to the suspicion that Barrie was deliberately exploring the nature of cognition in these stories,” writes Ridley in the book, newly out from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Other apparently fanciful ideas included in Barrie’s Peter Pan stories include Peter’s lack of understanding of hide and seek, and his inability to comprehend what emotional love is. ![]()
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