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Fairy tales are a popular form of narrative since Aesop began storytelling over 2500 years ago. Their continuing effect on children, is significantly made powerful through allegorical allusion to real life experiences, Adults continue to be stimulated by the metaphorical translation of life's experiences, reflected in the stories. Analysts and their patients are allegorically informed by myth as metaphor; for example, Freud's use of the narrative of the Oedipus myth as metaphor of the conflicts of early love and hate in the triadic relationship between a child and his or her parents. Jacob Arlow (1979) states that metaphor is used by the analyst to help the patient have insight into unconscious fantasy. Mythic images emerge in the analyst's mind “….represents the analyst's perception of an inner communication of his grasp of the patient's unconscious fantasy” (p. 371). The association to mythical images represents the analyst's intuitive understanding of the analysand in the analyst's mind. Jacob Arlow cites G. Victor (1978) who proposes that analysts go one step further and do as poets to stimulate the patient's associations by using metaphorical expressions or narratives as would a poet to touch a deep affective chord of a reader.
Kathleen Kelley-Lainé takes J.M. Barrie's story of Peter Pan in Neverland as a metaphor for arrested development, so commonly encountered by many clinicians. Childhood trauma often leads to retreating to an imaginary world of the past. But this book is much more than an exploration of arrested development. Four storylines draw deeper into the narratives of the protagonists, providing the reader with incisive insights into the psychology of the child aspect of the personalities. The different narratives intermingle and inform each other's insights from the other stories until the author- protagonist evolves from her origins as a lost child and approaches her life with adult eyes. With this perspective, Kelley-Lainé advocates the writing of