ABSTRACT

Another sunny afternoon setting of mixed emotion marked not only home-leaving for Hans Christian Andersen but also a milestone in his personal identity development. That Andersen persisted towards his own dream of a career in Copenhagen theaters with much joy and determination, despite contrary pressure and the awesome reality of a big wide world beyond Odense, attests to the young man’s healthy individuation process. Anna Freud’s whispered aside captures the essence of optimal conditions for the development of identity, according to both psychoanalytic and object relations traditions: a parent-child partnership that enables not only an adolescent’s confident, guiltless physical departure from the home of childhood both to love and to work in the wide world beyond, but also an intrapsychic departure from an internalized parental image that has to this point been one’s source of guidance, support and self-esteem. Hans Christian Andersen’s actions are possible through both reduction of his need for an intrapsychic parental representation as well as the gradually unfolding individuation process, concepts elaborated by Peter Blos in his

psychoanalytic account of identity development (or in his terms, character formation) during adolescence.