The Peter Pan syndrome: Was James M. Barrie anorexic?

1989

Recently, anorexia nervosa has been referred to as the “Peter Pan syndrome,” a metaphor based on the theme of not growing up. Beside the fact that Peter Pan was a “boy who would not grow up,” another parallelism with anorexia nervosa may lie within the creator himself. We discuss the possibility that James M. Barrie, author of “Peter Pan,” might have been himself anorexic in childhood and adolescence.