As its name suggests, a life story is a personal account of one's own existence. In other words, it is the testimony that an individual offers in relation to their personal experiences. These types of stories can be made in writing or orally. The concept of life history is equivalent to others, such as biography, autobiography or memoirs.
A research tool in the social sciences
Certain personal accounts are of singular interest to historians, anthropologists, or psychologists. His interest is not in the striking of the life story itself, but it is interesting because it can be a paradigmatic model about a historical period, a way of living or to better understand a mental pathology. In this sense, a life story of an albino in Tanzania is a story that provides very useful information about people with this genetic disease and their social reality.
Any autobiographical narrative has useful elements for an investigator. For this reason, the term psychobiography or psychohistory has been coined, since both refer to the connection between particular experiences and the general ideas of an era.
In the literary tradition there are so-called psychoanalytic biographies, in which the lives of certain famous people are approached from the perspective of psychoanalysis.
Regardless of the format of a life story, the account of an individual's personal experiences serves to gain a vision of reality. In this vision there are objective data (dates and events) and also subjective evaluations or descriptions about everyday life.
The life story of Anne Frank
The Diary of Anne Frank is an autobiographical book that tells a life story that has allowed us to better understand the persecution of the Jews during World War II. It is originally a personal diary in which Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager, tells how her life unfolds in an attic with her family and some acquaintances who have to remain in hiding for fear of being arrested by the Nazis.
After two years living in hiding, all of them were sent to a concentration camp. Anne Frank died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Anne Frank's father was able to survive and when World War II ended he recovered his daughter's diary so that it could be published.
The life story of Anne Frank is more than just a diary of a teenage girl. In its pages the reader finds a personal testimony about a reality that affected millions of Jews in Europe. It must be remembered, on the other hand, that Anne Frank was fully aware of what her diary could mean for future generations.
Photos: Fotolia - viktoriia1974 / XtravaganT
