In spite of Peter Pan's history of recurrent amnesia—he says of pirates," I forget them after I kill them,"(161) —the distressing memory of being barred from returning to his mother persists. Considering the preponderance of material purged or repressed in the adolescent mind, it is crucial for an analysis of subsequent behavior to identify which details of a child's life escape general oblivion. What remains in conscious memory is likely the most sig-nificant element in that whole period of life, regardless of whether it possessed such importance at the time or gained importance from the influence of later events (Freud, Character 193). In the traumatic memory cited above, Peter acknowledges his estrangement from the mother imago, an estrangement that persists without hope of redress. The barred window excludes Peter as participant in the previously abandoned familial context of mother and child in a nursery. Peter's personal story, mirroring that of the text, begins and ends with a flight from and return to the nursery window, the locus of his unresolved dilemma. Peter Pan was—and is—on the outside looking in. By returning to this locus Peter acknowledges his deprivation and reveals the purpose of his original flight."'Wendy, I ran away the day I was born.... It was because I heard father and mother,'he explained in a low voice,'talking about what I was to be when I became a man.'He was extraordinarily agitated now. Ί don't ever want to be a man,'he said with passion"(26). Peter's repudiation