Configuration of the Self: A Psychoanalytical Study of Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl

Abstract

The Diary of Anne Frank is known the world over as the diary of an adolescent Jewish girl writing about her experiences in hiding, with her family and some other unfortunate Jews, during the Second World War. She went into concealment in Holland for over two years, with the help of some sympathetic Christians, who were the employees of the same firm as her father’s, in order to escape the inevitable fate of the persecuted Jewish community of being deported to Nazi concentration camps. The present paper proposes to subject the above mentioned diary to a psychoanalytical study in order to better understand this traumatic experience. The Freudian concepts of sublimation, intellectualization, oedipal complex, reaction formation and displacement and condensation through the medium of dreams, have been dealt with therein.