Robin Birkmann
4-8-21
The 2016 coming-of-age comedy-drama film, The Edge of Seventeen, illustrates the
struggles of navigating high school and the awkwardness of becoming an adult. For this
assignment, I chose to focus on the character, Nadine. Besides being an awkward, self-loathing
teen, she acts very similarly to her mother. To further explain, she has unstable relationships with
not only herself but with other people and unstable emotions, since she constantly acts out in
anger.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Erik Erikson proposed a psychoanalytic theory of psychosocial
development which encompassed eight distinct stages from infancy to adulthood (Steinberg,
2020). During each of these stages, the developing person experiences psychosocial crises which
