J. M. Barrie's popular story of Peter Pan depicts the never-neverland of an endless happy childhood. Analysis of the story and of J. M. Barrie's personal background, however, reveals that the tale is a conflicted solution to and separation from early childhood losses and disappointments. Themes of separation and reunion, redesertion and revenge are repeated throughout Barrie's stories. For many people, the fantasy of a happy childhood may come to the fore during adolescence as the individual looks back with hopes for the unrealized and now unrealizable gratifications of childhood. Frequently, adolescent and adult patients seen by psychotherapists hold deeply felt fantasies about a happy childhood which cover over and compensate for real or felt losses and ungratified infantile desires. Such individuals are often markedly childlike in acting out these largely unconscious fantasies, yet significantly unaware of marked depressions. For many individuals seen in clinical practice, the necessary process of mourning has been incomplete, arrested, or has never taken place. Mourning for the loss of such fantasies can become a major task for psychoanalytic work. (Two cases are included that illustrate how the fantasy of a happy childhood can be a prominent feature forming an integral part of the patient's symptomatology.) (NRB)