Disney Plus Dream Vacation: Peter Pan

Introduction

Faculty, residents, and students at my university participated in the Disney Plus Dream Job and watched 30 Disney films in 30 days. While we completed the dream job on Friday, December 13, we’ll continue to post our top 25 blogs on Psychology Today. Only 2 posts remain! Keeping with our Billy Joel-inspired syllabus (1:18 here), our twenty-fourth post is on Peter Pan (1953).

Synopsis

Peter Pan (1953) is an animated adventure film based on the play of the same name (a.k.a. The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up) by J. M. Barrie. It is the 14th and final Disney animated feature released through RKO Radio Pictures before Walt Disney founded his own distribution company.

At the time of this posting, Peter Pan holds a rating of 7.3 out of 10 on IMDb and an audience score of 80% on Rotten Tomatoes.

How it relates to the field of psychiatry

Low Hanging Fruit

One of Peter Pan’s main themes is how duty and responsibility motivate human behavior. The eponymous Peter goes to great lengths to avoid all adult responsibility. For example, he refuses to play father (opposite to Wendy’s role of the great mother) to the Lost Boys. Peter’s longing to “never grow up” is likely a sublimation of the author who idolized children and lost his 14-year-old brother in an accident. Sublimation is an unconscious process of the ego (defense mechanism) that allows for the expression of a “forbidden” impulse. Barrie befriended Sylvia Davies in London’s Kensington Park, and was enamored with her sons; George, John, and Peter. He would meet his companions daily and make up stories featuring talking birds, fairies, and pirates walking the plank.

Low Hanging Fruit - part 2

Beyond a product of sublimation, Peter Pan also demonstrates characteristics of Antisocial Personality Disorder versus Conduct Disorder (because we don’t know his true age) as evidenced by his disregard for parents and authority. Like any personality disorder, clinicians must first rule-out the direct physiologic effects of a substance on the precipitation and perpetuation of Peter’s personality traits...

The High Fruit

In the initial scene where we are introduced to Peter (the bedroom of Wendy, John, and, Michael), he tells Wendy that the ingredients to fly are “just a little bit of pixie dust” and to “think a wonderful thought.” Pixie dust is street slang for a drug combination of ketamine and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) (1). Might Peter Pan be a case study of antisocial traits due to a substance use disorder that includes ketamine and LSD?

Ketamine has medicinal uses (Schedule III) as a dissociative anesthetic and appears to have a benefit in improving treatment-resistant depression (2). Recreational use results in intoxication effects similar to phencyclidine (PCP), a chemical analogue of ketamine.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is another hallucinogen that is in the psychedelic subclass. Among its many psychological and physiological effects is the distortion of time and space that may lead to the belief that one can fly. Perhaps “pixie dust” explains Peter’s antisocial traits (PCP) as well as his belief that he could fly (LSD). His assertion that you must “think wonderful thoughts” to fly reinforces the idea that one’s frame of mind during acute intoxication from a hallucinogen may influence the perceptual experience. Thinking wonderful thoughts may result in feelings of floating, euphoria, and enhanced mental clarity while “bad trips” are often hallmarked by the fear of losing one’s mind.