Psychosexual Development and Immigrant Status Implications on the Mother-Daughter Relationship between Edith Frank and Anne Frank (Essay Sample)

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Psychosexual Development and Immigrant Status Implications on the Mother-Daughter Relationship between Edith Frank and Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, a relevant historical record portraying the circumstances revolving around the life of a young Jewish girl during the Second World War, has undergone different analyses, in the efforts of yielding a comprehensive overview of the young girl’s life and a description of its development, as well as the evaluation of different perspectives associated to surrounding entities. These attempts of unlocking the underlying representations of elements produced varied levels of perception in relation to Anne Frank. Moreover, the emergence of different versions of the text, with later variations including initially omitted portions of passages as presented in the Definitive Edition of The Diary of a Young Girl, paved the way for more in-depth investigations. The Definitive Edition gained much controversy in its characteristically vivid and graphic content, especially as it pertains to Anne’s exploration of her sexuality. The purposes of recollecting and assembling the fragments of history by making use of this account also led to other investigations, such as the assessment of Anne’s personality and its progression in the two-year span of growth and development. In this paper, The Diary of a Young Girl will be explored in light of Anne’s maturity, as molded by her experience in the Second World War setting. To be specific, this paper will probe into the relationship Anne shared with her mother, Edith Frank, as well as its psychological implications, facilitated by Anne’s development into the adolescent stage. In order to properly establish these cognitive implications, Anne’s personality and the changes it undergoes as she shifts from childhood to adulthood will be taken into consideration. Although the focus is on Anne’s relationship with her mother, the nature of her connection with her father Otto Frank will be taken into account, as the differences in the nature of Anne’s relationships with both builds the notion behind her behavior towards her mother. Furthermore, the prevalence and unavoidability of fear and worry in their setting will be used to provide insights on Edith’s attitude towards Anne and further develop the establishment of their mother-daughter relationship. Ultimately, these various findings will be synthesized into a single, comprehensive description of the relationship between the mother and the daughter.
I. Anne Frank’s Diary: Revealing the Progress of Adolescent Behavior
The use of a diary in the attempt of filling gaps in history provides information from a single perspective, as the diary serves as text presenting information regarding an individual’s experiences written with the purpose of personal expression, yet attempting to maintain privacy. The text, as it contains a narrative of everyday experiences, expression of ideas and beliefs, as well as interpretations of different phenomena occurring in the setting the author belongs to, allows a visualization of the changes in the individual’s internal and external environment, as these factors shape the structure and flow of thought. It presents highlights of various occurrences, depending on which particular situation the author of the diary finds most amusing and memorable. Moreover, the influential factors surrounding the psychological development of a person become objects of study when putting the pieces of the puzzle together.
The content is not limited to the experiences of an adolescent subject to privacy and secrecy; it also depicts the development in the structure of thinking. The use of a diary presents an opportunity to draw history in chronology, as the text portrays an arrangement in sequence. The order of thought direction, with associated feelings and emotions, as well as the emergence of different links, is offered by its study. These bases answer the questions and knowledge gaps revolving around the identification and construction of conflict and the formation of corresponding resolutions. These resolutions offer knowledge and further direction, if ever the same situation arises in the future.
The Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into different languages, including Chinese language, with the prevalent recognition as a form of Holocaust writing, which describes the customary approach in introducing the text (Sion 178). The diary does not encompass Anne Frank’s victimization, however, as her records show cessation days before her arrest. Therefore, her diary has been considered by historians as a text without the usual suffering affiliated to Holocaustic events. This inadequacy in specific holocaustic experiences, as well as the text’s publication years after Anne Frank’s death, led to varied interpretations of the young girl’s life. The diary presents occurrences in a unique historical moment, but the normality of the changes occurring, despite the peculiarity of their environment, becomes the more surprising factor (Dalsimer 488). The biological and psychological processes and changes associated to adolescent development is evident, even under the circumstances brought about by the holocaust, modifying Anne’s concept of self, and redefining the nature of relationship she has with her parents.
Anne’s distinct personality, evident in the characteristic of writing, has undergone changes along the course of her experiences from being a normal child to living in the setting of warfare and oppression. Although the environment Anne belonged to was quite different, the manifestations of her psychological development as a growing female have surfaced. This concept itself, however, faced the obstacles of several hindrances that came from fixations in parental relationships reinforced by the state of living.
Anne has been initially described as a sociable and expressive schoolgirl, who received much love from her family and friends. Anne went about her daily life with the usual school errands, waited for grades and remarks, noticed boys, and experienced the life of a girl reaching adolescence (Dalsimer 489). She received her diary on her thirteenth birthday, as she mentioned in the earliest passages contained in her diary. The mixture of enthusiasm, as well as the interests pertaining to adolescent characteristics, portrayed Anne’s transitional phase in the course of her development into adolescence. However, the adaptations to a new sort of lifestyle, offered by the confinement within the annex, without the comfort of freedom and the assurance of safety, forced Anne to restructure the pattern of her maturity. Due to the limitations imposed by living within a confined space, Anne subconsciously developed ways of fulfilling her desire to explore the onset of adolescence. The developments in her thinking are highly attributed to the psychological changes that occur innately, as she performs her initial exploration of womanhood.
The Definitive Edition of The Diary of a Young Girl offers augmentation of the initially omitted details in the entries of the diary. This covers Anne’s graphic description of the changes occurring in her body, as well as her investigative description as suggested in her assertion that goes:
“Everything’s pretty well arranged in us women. Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris. (Frank 233).”
As the passage suggests, Anne became more observant as she grew, and without the familiarity offered by institutional education, as well as the conservativeness of their generation, she began to question the changes that occurred physically without inhibitions, as the characteristic confidence in her writing suggested. Anne presented the initial experiences of sexual desire, as well as the build-up of affection towards her peer in the annex, Peter van Daan. The development of this relationship marks the commencement of Anne’s detachment from each of her parents. The characteristic boldness in writing is attributed to its composition and Anne’s evident extroversion. Had she had a social circle she would have had the chance to share her experiences with, Anne would have written less unreservedly (Dalsimer 488). The absence of factors from her supposedly external environment increased her connection to her inner life.
The process of genital knowledge assimilation in Anne’s adolescent development, presented the progressive and continuously developing course of female adolescence, and not a series of denial claims (Evert 123). The heightened awareness of excitement provided aids in the alteration of the involvement in an undeniably horrific situation. Anne explored her seductive capabilities and engaged in the derivatives of her desires and fears. Disrupting the process of shifting towards adolescence leads to clinical anomalies. The lack of awareness in relation to genital discourse facilitates the emergence of problems such as sexuality denial, the decline of self-esteem, narcissistic preoccupation and fixation in psychological development stages. Disallowing the incorporation and integration of sexual desires presents the consequences of sexual inhibition and other psychological disorders and complications related to one’s sexuality.
II. Anne Frank’s Relationship with Her Parents and its Psychological Implications
Similar to most war memoirs, The Diary of a Young Girl exposes two struggles in Anne Frank’s life. On one hand, Anne strived to survive the Nazis. On the other hand, she strived to survive the shift from childhood to adulthood, ...