J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: a Multiple Personality Story

Peter Pan is not an immature man or a man who wishes for eternal youth. He is a prepubescent boy who never ages. He has hardly any memory of the past and hardly any sense of the future. No such boy has ever existed. And most men would not want to be one.

Such boys are found only in multiple personality. Indeed, as noted in yesterday’s post, they are one of the most common types of alternate personality.

“Child and infant personalities are found in virtually every MPD [multiple personality disorder] patient’s system of alter[nate] personalities. Usually there will be a number of child personalities, and they often exceed the number of adult personalities. The child and infant personalities are usually frozen in time; they are locked into a given age…” (1).

The other thing that I wish to highlight is found in “J. M. Barrie’s Introduction to the Play Peter Pan,” which begins:

“Some disquieting confessions must be made in printing at last the play of Peter Pan; among them is this, that I have no recollection of having written it…I remember writing the story of Peter and Wendy many years after the production of the play, but I might have cribbed that from some typed copy. I can haul back to mind the writing of almost every other assay of mine, however forgotten by the pretty public; but this play of Peter, no…How odd, too, that these trifles should adhere to the mind that cannot remember the long job of writing Peter” (2).

J. M. Barrie’s amnesia for writing Peter Pan reminds me of Sir Walter Scott’s amnesia for writing one of his novels, which I discussed at the end of my Dickens essay (June 2013 post).

The point is this, that if a writer had multiple personality, it would have been possible for one personality to have written something and have remembered doing so, but for another personality to have no memory of it.

It may be that the one who remembered writing Peter Pan was M’Connachie (see May 14th post).

1. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

2. J. M. Barrie. The Annotated Peter Pan: The Centennial Edition, Edited by Maria Tatar. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.