Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

by Robert M. Sapolsky

an example that occurred in a British Victorian family. A son, age thirteen, the beloved favorite of the mother, is killed in an accident. The mother, despairing and bereaved, takes to her bed in grief for years afterward, utterly ignoring her other, six-year-old son. Horrible scenes ensue. For example, the boy, on one occasion, enters her darkened room; the mother, in her delusional state, briefly believes it is the dead son—“David, is that you? Could that be you?”—before realizing: “Oh, it is only you.” Growing up, being “only you.” On the rare instances when the mother interacts with the younger son, she repeatedly expresses the same obsessive thought: the only solace she feels is that David died when he was still perfect, still a boy, never to be ruined by growing up and growing away from his mother. The younger boy, ignored (the stern, distant father seemed to have been irrelevant to the family dynamics), seizes upon this idea; by remaining a boy forever, by not growing up, he will at least have some chance of pleasing his mother, winning her love. Although there is no evidence of disease or malnutrition in his well-to-do family, he ceases growing. As an adult, he is just barely five feet in height, and his marriage is unconsummated. And then the chapter informs us that the boy became the author of the much-beloved children’s classic—Peter Pan. J. M. Barrie’s writings are filled with children who didn’t grow up, who were fortunate enough to die in childhood, who came ...