Tales from the Therapist's Couch

The woman I am sitting with is in her late thirties, but if I didn't know this it would be hard to guess her age.

The woman I am sitting with is in her late thirties, but if I didn't know this it would be hard to guess her age. She has, as always, come to the session straight from jogging, and her running shoes, T-shirt and tracksuit add to an impression of boyish, almost androgynous, youthfulness.

We have worked together for several years, and over that time one image in particular has come to encapsulate the anguish she repeatedly finds herself in. Drawn from a dream she had early on, it is the image of a bird in flight, soaring and circling high above the world. She easily identifies with this bird. When in flight she feels on top of her world. During these times she feels passionately alive, inspired and inspiring. But when the flight ends, whether because the mountain climb is over - one of her hobbies is mountaineering - or the love affair is past its peak, there is a terrible spiralling down to an abyss of bleak despair.

This pattern of flight and fall, a fairly frequent one in the consulting room, is embedded in Jung's notion of the puer aeternus: the eternal youth who retains an adolescent horror of growing up. First coined by Ovid in his description of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, the puer aeternus is probably best known in our Western culture through Peter Pan, JM Barrie's spirited creation, whose flight from becoming adult took him to Neverland.

So what do these myths and stories illuminate about the Peter Pan types of today, those men and women who, like the woman above, hunger for moments of passionate intensity, and who so often, like Peter Pan, both illuminate and frustrate the world around them? Why the need to soar?

Psychological interpretations of puer or Peter Pan types tend to focus on what is being escaped from. Women and men who get easily bored by routine and who lack the staying power necessary for tethering themselves down to the world are, it is argued, essentially escaping from a difficult early relationship with their respective fathers and mothers. To clip their wings would mean feeling smothered by the world around them. So survival depends upon escaping commitment and searching instead for further flights into moments of intensity. Many puer types satisfy their need for fiery passion by becoming Don Juan figures. Others feed their need for a "high" through extreme sports. Others again through drugs. Whatever the lifestyle, many suffer, like Icarus, from flying too close to the sun.

In my experience, the father/mother root sometimes fits, but by no means always. Sometimes there is simply and deeply a forlorn feeling of emotional homelessness from the whole package of early family and later life.

The woman above, for example, suffered much emotional pain in her early years because of a lengthy and acrimonious parental divorce. There had never been, for her, a feeling of being comfortably on home ground, and from an early age she developed the capacity to take refuge from unhappiness by seeking out moments of intensity, both physical and emotional. These flights from her world gave her a tremendous feeling of freedom from all that had sapped and trapped her in life. But they were essentially transient. There was always the descent. And she always had difficulty in finding her feet in the mundane routines of the everyday, because she had never known recognition or security in that place.

There is much to value in what Peter Pans bring to our world. Like the archetypal adolescent, they are full of youthful energy and intensity, and have the capacity to challenge and transform the staid and fixed. But there is often a poignant sense of emotional homelessness about such puer types, a feeling that unless they can learn to graft some of their energy on to the routine of the everyday, home is always elsewhere as they restlessly search for a moment of further intensity.

There is a poem by Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", that comes to mind, as it encapsulates how the emotional intensity experienced in the Neverland of flight can, tragically, be more important than life itself: "A lonely impulse of delight/ Drove to this tumult in the clouds:/ I balanced all, brought all to mind,/ The years to come seemed waste of breath,/ A waste of breath the years behind/ In balance with this life, this death."

Elizabeth Meakins is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. None of the clinical material above refers to specific cases

elizabeth.meakins@blueyonder.co.uk