Peter Pan syndrome : children men

Arrived at the age of puberty, human being arrives in major phase change in his life. Physical and psychological changes, discussions subjects will do the difference between a little boy and a teenager. Peter Pan syndrome can appear from the age of 13 years, teenager wants to be listened to, loved and that we indulge him every whim, everybody must be agree with his wishes.

« Show that you are a man » : it is the style of speech affected from the syndrome and could not support. At a more advanced age, Peter Pan syndrome brings men to adopt children behaviour. We recognize them by absolute loneliness and a dissatisfaction feeling. These men need to feel they are loved. Attached since his childhood, love of their mothers lacks them that they look for from their spouse the same attachment. Women have sometimes difficulties to understand no one loving relation seems to last a long time.

This syndrome can come form a grave pain during childhood, a traumatism which brings the person to take away from others. Loneliness and isolation are for them solution to escape to life realities; sometimes too hard at suffering, now, it is like that being an adult. Peter Pan syndrome can be treated by a psychotherapy, the aim is to teach the patient to know him better and to develop in him the responsibility feeling and his place in social environment.

The concept was developed by Dan Kiley (psychanalist) in 1983. His name was inspired by Peter Pan, hero created by J. M. Barrie. In spite of rigorous psychological approach of the work Peter Pan syndrome, this syndrome is not recognized yet by the DSM-IV as mental illness.

The syndrome appears more often at the beginning of adult age, when individual begins to have responsibilities. The more often, there are single. Kiley notes that we observe particularly in remote children whose father was often criticized at home by the mother and reacted by passivity instead of providing their viewpoint. In this case, it would be a mimetism of escape.

At maturity age – which does not wait necessarily for a social determined age even if sociologic statistic informs us that it is near forty – in what we name sometimes « the second part of life », the adult (at becoming) can feel the need to find a link with himself, with his interior child and inscribe himself in life in a different manner.

Working at link with his interior child is then used too in a psychotherapeutic approach of certain currents of Psychotherapy of Psychoanalytical inspiration (P.I.P indicating a family of psychic cares) as in John Bradshaw or Hal and Sidra Stone in his work Interior dialogue.

For people suffering from attachment difficulties (anxiety to attach, uncontrollable attachment, relationship doing suffer), the primitive attachment mother-child would be the prototype of affinities, and more generally, privileged relationships of adult later. Then it has to repair « the link » and to calm patient in his relation with the world. Then he will be able, knowing himself, to compromise with his pain and enter in relationship.

Once reworked the « painful » link, the patient (man or woman) can quit then pathogen relationships for himself such as : drink, compulsive sexuality (or held back), the maltreating spouse (man or women), the professional or domestic overactivity, over-intellectualisation or ideological war for ideological war. For people suffering from Peter Pan syndrome, it is then to open the patient to world reality in order he inscribes in it. Then he will be able to hold his place.