Presentation time:
40 min
Discussion time:
5 min
Lead author:
Jetthe Fabioola (C. G. Jung Institute, Copenhagen)
The presenter offers a new perspective on early individuation, seeing, e.g. nightmares of preschoolers as an expression of a first individuation crisis and part of the child’s ongoing separation from the symbiosis with the containing mother/motherly. Focusing on the girls, I argue that the daughter archetype, the Female Hero, plays an underexposed and vital role in early individuation. In a patriarchal culture, the hero has been commonly assumed to be the source of support at this stage. But it is the hero's female counterpart, the Female Hero, that enables girls - supported by father and Imaginatio - to liberate themselves and meet the demands for adjustment to the fatherly world while gendering their ego in a feminine way with an openness to the opposite sex - in themselves and in the world.