Children fear future bodily change as a threat to their own identity

Evidence

It is useless to try to explain that when the day comes, neither deflowering nor childbirth would seem so terrible, that millions of women resign themselves to it and are none the worse for it. When a child fears an outside occurrence, he is relieved of the fear, but not by predicting that, later, he will accept it naturally: it is himself he fears meeting in the far-off future, alienated and lost. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar, through chrysalis and into butterfly, brings about a deep uneasiness: Is it still the same caterpillar after this long sleep? Does she recognize herself beneath these brilliant wings? I knew little girls who were plunged into an alarming reverie at the sight of a chrysalis. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 729

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The caterpillar-metamorphosis image compresses a genuinely radical point: that for a girl, womanhood is experienced not as growth but as self-alienation and loss of identity — the chrysalis is a vehicle for Beauvoir’s central thesis that becoming a woman means becoming other to oneself.
• STORYSTEM: A narrative seed: a girl’s alarming reverie at a chrysalis as the hinge moment where she first intuits her own future metamorphosis as loss rather than arrival.
• XREF: connects to: Children’s specific fears coalesce into fear of their own nonexistence — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 125; Puberty’s bodily changes alienate the girl from herself and the world — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835; Learning the truth of sex transforms the child into another being marked by shame — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 728 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Puberty’s bodily changes alienate the girl from herself and the world #exemplifies (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835
• Puberty transforms the girl’s body from familiar self into strange flesh. #exemplifies (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 738
• Children’s specific fears coalesce into fear of their own nonexistence #expands (0.85) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 125
• Learning the truth of sex transforms the child into another being marked by shame #exemplifies (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 728
• Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709