Imaginary love affairs defend adolescent girls against feared real sexual contact
Evidence
Finding a pretext that permits her to elude concrete experiences, the adolescent girl often develops an intense imaginary life. She chooses to confuse her fantasies with reality. Among other examples, Helene Deutsch describes a particularly significant one: a pretty and seductive girl, who could have easily been courted, refused all relations with young people around her; but at the age of thirteen, in her secret heart, she had chosen to idolize a rather ugly seventeen-year-old boy who had never spoken to her. She got hold of a picture of him, wrote a dedication to herself on it, and for three years kept a diary recounting her imaginary experiences: they exchanged kisses and passionate embraces; there were sometimes crying scenes where she left with her eyes all red and swollen; then they were reconciled, and she sent herself flowers, and so on. When a move separated her from him, she wrote him letters she never sent him but that she answered herself. This story was most obviously a defense against real experiences that she feared. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 890
Categorization
- XREF: The self-directed letters and diary echo the narcissistic structure Beauvoir describes throughout The Second Sex. — connects to: Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709; Even the most conventional girls express forbidden sexual desires in fantasy play; Inauthentic love lets the beloved ratify one’s infantile fantasies instead of moving beyond them
Broader Connections
- Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters
#corroborates(0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709 - Inauthentic love lets the beloved ratify one’s infantile fantasies instead of moving beyond them
#expands(0.80) - Even the most conventional girls express forbidden sexual desires in fantasy play
#complicates(0.75)