Individuation Crisis and Ego Gendering in Pre-schoolers – Emphasizing the Female Hero in Girls’ Development

This paper offers a new perspective on early girls’ individuation. The author suggests that the female hero plays here an underexposed yet vital role. The female hero is the female counterpart to the male hero, which in a patriarchal culture has been commonly assumed to be the source of support at this stage. It enables girls – supported by father and imagination – to liberate themselves and meet the demands for adjustment to the fatherly world while gendering their ego as feminine with an openness to the other sex where opposites are at play. The author presents empirical material gathered during anthropological fieldwork in a Copenhagen primary school and includes dream, drawing and narrative to show how the female hero emerges and becomes an important element in resolving the developmental and individuation crisis. A client case connects un-resolve in preschool to a later mid-life crisis.