You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The analytic reader of John Skinner's exposition of James Barrie's life will gain insight into Barrie's personality, his character and neurosis, the motivation for his creativity, the appeal of Peter Pan to so many of us, the interrelationship between facts and fantasies, work and writing. The reader will also feel that something essential and important is left unsaid, even if it is always there and implied.
It is as if John Skinner wants us to experience a writer's anxiety without explicitely showing us the defenses on the one hand and the productive use of the “creative anxiety” on the other hand. Perhaps John Skinner's restraint in this respect is due to his attitude toward the man to whom he devotes his analytic study. Dr. George Wilbur summarizes this neatly by changing John Skinner's last sentence from “The Boy Who wouldn't Grow Up,” to read, “The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up.”
We observe hesitation and restraint in many analytic biographies, whether they concern Beethoven, Swift, Caroll, or the founder of psychoanalysis himself. When an analyst analyses, as it were, in public, using names and events that are known and public property, he will trespass into intimacy and, therefore, should interpret with special caution. Let us dare to be a little bolder.
James Barrie grew old but never grew up. He became