Showing results for "Peter Pan" in Psychology & Mental Health

Is your husband or boyfriend afraid of growing up? Do responsibilities and maturity elude your significant other? He may very well be suffering from Peter pan Syndrome. It is quite possible that your husband or boyfriend never took on any responsibilities as a teenager and continues to remain stuck at the mental capacity of a teenager. It is not too far-fetched to understand how someone who avoided all responsibilities and ever matured, to grown up maintaining that sense of self-worth.

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up?, she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence.

What is Peter Pan Syndrome? This disorder is based off Peter Pan, the boy who never grows old. The book written by J.M. Barrie “Peter Pan” was about a boy and a few others that were allowed into a world where no adults could venture. Unfortunately, some children never grow up. The psychologist Dan Kiley, in 1983, coined the Peter Pan Syndrome. He wrote in his book that for every Peter Pan, there is a Wendy as his shadow.