Fantasies of Flight

Borrowing from a tradition begun by Freud but abandoned when academic psychologists grew suspicious of storytelling and became reliant on numbers as preferred ways to create and affirm knowledge, Ogilvie (psychology, Rutgers U.) attempts to decipher the meaning of flying fantasies by sketching a psychobiography of J.M. Barrie, the father of Peter Pan. He begins by reviewing the role of case studies in psychological research, moves on to a quest to identify and make sense of the conditions that produced Peter Pan, and wraps up with an exploration of Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and a more general vision of how progress can be made in answering the fundamental question: What is meant by the self? Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR