Being Peter Pan

In 1902 , the Scottish Novelist and Playwriter , J.M.Barrie , in a novel called " The Little White Beard", introduces a character called Peter Pan who is a 7 days years old baby who has flown from his nursery to Kesington Gardens in London where the fairies and bird taught him to fly . He is described as a creature between a boy and a bird .
The character Peter Pan would later develop in to the archetype of the boy who would never grow up into manhood and also of a certain carelessness and selfishness towards life.
The expression " Being a Peter Pan " immediately adopted a negative connotation , implying the incapacity vs refusal , in accepting the painful contradictions that reality imposes onto every human being . Modern Psychoanalysis even adopted the name Peter Pan in reference to the inability that certain individuals have ( usually men but also some women ) to believe that they are of an older age and/or to engage in behavior usually associated with adulthood , by calling The Peter Pan Syndrome .
The concept became popular when in 1983 the American Psychoanalyst Dr Dan Kiley in his book " The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up"mentions the fact that while doing therapy with teenage boys he detected an incapacity from them to grow up and accept adult responsibilities like the character of J.M.Barrie. And this problem continue into adulthood.

Without wanting to dispute the truth of a science i know very little if not nothing, i would like to put aside the pejorative association of  the name Peter Pan , so negative that even the British author Aldous Huxley associate it with the sinister figure of Adolf Hitler, and restaure the name into a more favorable manner .
Recognizing myself as one of those Peter Pans that roam the world like plagues of locusts in the fields of adulthood conformity , i see being Peter Pan as not a denial and refuse of dealing with reality but rather an harmless drug against its most poisonous effects .
Reality for an highly conscious being with all its contradictions , incoherences, is sometimes an unbearable and often traumatic experience. If we can alleviate the weight of that reality by creating our own personal Neverland even if briefly , i take that as an healthy mechanism of self defence , a balsam for one`s soul .
When in his extraordinary novel" Le Petit Prince" , Antoine St Exupéry makes the little Prince tell us that we should never lose the child inside of us with the risk that by doing so we will lose also the capability of seeing life with awe, wonder , magic; What is he telling us if not that Peter Pan must live with us!? Within certain boundaries of course. Because in the bottomless pit of the human mind the line between sanity and insanity is rather slim.