Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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66 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
<I>Now or Neverland</I> : Peter Pan, Enigmatic Messenger, December 28, 1999
I've just finished reading Ann Yeoman's stunning Jungian book, <I>Now or Neverland</I> Inner City Books, 1998, ISBN 0-919123-83-X. 191 pp.) I'm going to read it again quite soon, as it is so packed with new information and living ideas a single reading can't do it justice. I picked it up because I'm interested in the Divine Child and the Puer Aeternus archetypes, which I believe are very closely related, and I thought Peter Pan might have something to say on the matter. He does, but it's backward -- he is a strangely subversive and disruptive figure, refusing to settle into any one role -- hovering at the window of Barrie's England (its stuffy ideals still very much a part of our own social history and psyche), but equally uncomfortable in the Neverland to which he always escapes, no matter how much he crows and manipulates an enthralled Wendy, her brothers and the Lost Boys and the rest of Neverland. He is, this Peter Pan, an enigmatic, often dark figure, related to gods like Mercurius, Pan, Dionysus, and an astonishing lot of others (Icarus, Prometheus, Lucifer and Narcissus are mentioned, I think quite correctly). I shall certainly never read PETER PAN the same way again -- forget Mary Martin or that Disney fraud. Forget Robin Williams too. I wanted to read this book because Ann Yeoman is combining a career at New College, University of Toronto, where she is Dean of Students with teaching Jung and literature courses and a small practice as a Jungian analyst. What I hadn't expected was her brilliant concluding chapter, in which she compares Neverland and the Internet. She is certainly the first Jungian analyst I've found who is addressing the kinds of problems that have been concerning me for the past five years. So we may find out something about Peter Pan's dilemma from cyberspace -- I have certainly met lost boys (and lost girls) floating around, scarcely remembering where home is, and heard more than one ticking crocodile. There's more to come from this Peter Pan -- we have not heard the last word from him or from Ann Yeoman. From the concluding chapter - "Peter Pan provides a metaphor for the unknown new - rootless consciousness is the dis-ease of contemporary society as it faces an uncertain future. The radical uncertainty of our future finds its own metaphor in our rapidly evolving electronic technology. In many ways, the elusive promise embodied in Peter Pan is the promise also of cyberspace. The new electronic era invites us to enter an indeterminate virtual realm where, it seems, everything and anything is possible, where we may create ourselves as we desire, where freedom and creativity know no bounds. Yet the very metaphors we use to describe this virtual zone are ambiguous. Netscape, Web, Internet, Windows, Paths -- images of boundless potential, but also metaphors for entrapment and delusion. On the one hand, Internet users access a seemingly unlimited network of information; on the other, the value and structure of that same information must be questioned, if one is not to run the risk of having one's mind made up for one, as an unwitting adherent of, to quote Derrick de Kerckhove, a 'collective, techno-cultural morality' which generates an 'average and averaging psychology.' Who are we when flying in the Neverland of cyberspace?" (pp. 175-6) Sir James Barrie (who gave us both play and novel) and his creation Peter Pan are both a bit uncanny, unsettling. What message do they bring us today, as we fly toward the sill of the new Millennium?
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Now or Neverland, March 10, 2004
In "Now or Neverland," Ann Yeoman invites her readers to explore the complex world of the archetype of the eternal boy (puer aeternus) through her lively psychological analysis of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Yeoman's book is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary scholarship. She intelligently integrates the work done in such seemingly diverse fields as Mythological Studies (Eliade, Campbell, Kerenyi), Literary Criticism (Frye, Calvino, Armitt), and Analytical Psychology (Jung, Hillman, von Franz). Her use of literature, both poetry (Coleridge, Auden, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley) and fiction (Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Melville), to illuminate various dimensions of puer psychology is outstanding and speaks highly of her as a literary scholar. Her cultural contextualization of Peter Pan in history (Edwardian England, the current Information Revolution, the British public school system) presents a provocative analysis of the collective psychology of the times. Finally, her reinterpretation and elaboration of earlier (1970s) studies of puer psychology and psychopathology by analytical (Jungian) psychologists, makes her one of the foremost authorities on the psychology of what popular culture has called the "Peter Pan Syndrome". There is little doubt that Now or Neverland will become a classic and take its place alongside Hillman's "Puer Papers" and von Franz's "The Problem of Puer Aeternus."
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Persective on the Peter Pan Myth, March 23, 2000
Peter Pan was always a childhood favorite of mine. Now, having read Ann Yeoman's "Now and Neverland. Peter Pan on the Myth of Eternal Youth", I will approach the story and its characters with a new and, dare I say it, "grown-up" (sorry Peter) perspective. Ms. Yeoman's writing style is clear and a pleasure to read. She presents unique and interesting insight into the hero, Peter Pan in an easy to follow manner and hence facilitates an "deeper" understanding of the myth and how it relates to us all. I highly recommend it!
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