Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  "Why a mirror? A mirror for others? To reflect others, or yourself living behind a mirror and unable to touch real life?"

  "Allendy called me a petite fille littéraire. This did not dispose of my passion for writing, my vital preoccupation with orientations, awareness of the deviations of my creative instincts. But he was the saving diversion. I need to be diverted from my anxieties."

  "There is nothing wrong with a desire for intellectual adventure."

  "But now, as I sit here, I am as truthful as I am with my journal."

  "Confusion creates art. Too much confusion creates unbalance."

  He seemed to have such a love of creation, of invention, to understand my motivations coming from dreams. When I talked about my father, he related it immediately to the various myths in literature which stemmed from dreams. He said:

  "In folk tradition, handed down through fairy tales, there exists a type of story, similar all over the world, which contains the same elements. They are the mythological motifs which we see now guiding your life. In these stories the father leaves for twenty years, returns and finds his daughter a woman. In an early book of mine on the Father and Daughter love in literature, I collected all these stories and analyzed carefully the classical representation of them. One of them was the well-known Pericles legend, popular throughout the Middle Ages and dramatized by Shakespeare.

  "While the details of this universal legend change according to time and custom, the essential plot always remains the same: the girl is abandoned as an infant but is miraculously rescued and, after many adventures, finds her father whom she does not know or recognize. This meeting takes place after some legendary twenty years. A lapse of time which can be explained on the simple ground that, at this time, the daughter is mature and ready to become a woman. The father, not knowing that he has found his abandoned daughter, falls in love with her; but in the traditional story they recognize each other before incest is committed.

  "These elaborate stories with their dreamlike quality have been explained, mythologically that is, as symbolic representations of cosmic cycles, as myths of the Sun and the Moon which flee and meet each other alternatively. It must be admitted that such a cosmic explanation, provided it is not carried too far into astronomic details, fits these adventurous happenings much better than the realistic interpretation of the psychoanalysts, who claim that these stories prove the human desire for incestuous union between parent and children. The fact that, in tradition, they do not know or recognize each other when they finally meet, does not bother these psychological interpreters, who see in that motif a reflection of the repression of the desire for incest, a desire which has to remain unconscious, unknown to the self.

  "The question was whether, in a literary sense, these stories were created or written from the point of view of the girl or the father? Because the corresponding tradition of the hero (which I studied in a separate essay wherein the hero is exposed as an infant, miraculously rescued, and usually married his mother, like the famous Oedipus of the Greek saga) is evidently created from the son's point of view. Naturally his story glorified the superhuman deeds of his heroic self; whereas the feminine heroine, in the other kind of tradition, seems to be seen through the eyes of the father and pictured the way he wants her to be.

  "Another difference between the cosmic hero and the cosmic heroine, as depicted in these sources of tradition, is equally puzzling. Although the myth of the hero glorifies his godlike achievements, it sounds, to me, more human and less cosmic than the adventurous life of the daughter, whose main achievement seems to be the finding of the man in the lost father by simply following her love inspirations. And yet this human, all too human motif is expressed in a wealth of cosmic symbolism which is lacking in the presentation of the hero, whose life and achievement have an earthy quality.

  "This seeming paradox may be due to the fact that the man was able to carry out some of his ambitious dreams in reality by cultural creations; whereas the woman, being closer to the cosmic forces, had to express even human motifs in universal symbols. In the Arabian Nights, for example, which grew out of old mythical traditions, the woman not only is constantly compared to the moon, but she is the moon, she acts like the moon. She always disappears for a certain amount of time and has to be pursued and found by her true lover, as the day meets the night at dawn, just for a kiss, in order to separate again.

  "The humanized tradition of this 'incestuous' cycle, as we find it in the literature of all times and all people, might very well have been written down by man. He has always been keen to usurp all creation; and the proverbial passivity of the woman, who always appears as waiting or pursued, might have enabled him to depict her as he wanted her, in her life story written by him. And now I am glad to hear the woman's side of the story."

  This was the substance of our first talk. As we talked, he showed me the books in his bookcase. Then, as I left, he looked at the diary volume I was carrying and said, "Leave that with me."

  I was startled. It was true I had brought it, as I often carried it about, to write in it while I waited here and there. But I had also written in it the fabrications I had intended to tell Dr. Rank. And to suddenly expose it all to someone frightened me. What would he think? Would he lose interest in me? Would he be shocked, startled? It was a bold stroke. He interpreted my carrying it as a wish to share it. He challenged my "offer." I hesitated, and then I placed it on the low table between the two armchairs. And I left.

  ***

  The second talk. Dr. Rank said:

  "We know very little about woman. In the first place, it was man who invented 'the soul.' Man was the philosopher and the psychologist, the historian and the biographer. Woman could only accept man's classifications and interpretations. The women who played important roles thought like men, and wrote like men.

  "It was only while delving into the subconscious that we began to understand that the feminine way of acting, woman's motivations, more often came from that mixture of intuition, instinct, personal experience, personal relation to all things, which men deny having. It was through psychology that we discovered that man's illusion about his objectivity was a fiction, a fiction he needed to believe in. The most objective systems of thought can be exposed as having a subjective base. Now, the way a woman feels is closer to three forms of life: the child, the artist, the primitive. They act by their instant vision, feeling, and instinct. They remained in touch with that mysterious region we are now opening up. They were inarticulate except in terms of symbols, through dreams and myths."

  As he talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feelings, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless.

  Wasn't it D. H. Lawrence who wrote of how women took their pattern from man, and proceeded to be what man invented? Few writers have had a direct vision into woman. Few women had vision into themselves! And when they did, they were revolted at what they saw, just as people were revolted by what Freud exposed.

  Man must fear the effort woman is making to create herself, not to be born of Adam's rib. It revives his old fears of her power. What he forgets is that dependency does not create love, and to control nature is not a greater achievement than to control woman, for there will always be the revolts of instinct, the earthquakes and the tidal waves. With control one also killed the rich natural resources of both nature and woman. It was woman who reacted against the great dehumanization of man by industry, the machine. Man reacted by mutiny, or crime. Woman sought other ways. Mutiny is not in her nature.

  Dr. Rank said: "I do not believe in long-drawn-out psychoanalysis. I do not believe in spending too much time exploring the past, delving into it. I believe neurosis is like a virulent abscess, or infection. It has to be attacked powerfully in the present. Of course, the origin of the illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the cor
e of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today's fever or abscess of the soul.

  "I believe analysis has become the worst enemy of the soul. It killed what it analyzed. I saw too much psychoanalysis with Freud and his disciples which became pontifical, dogmatic. That was why I was ostracized from the original group. I became interested in the artist. I became interested in literature, in the magic of language. I disliked medical language, which was sterile. I studied mythology, archeology, drama, painting, sculpture, history. What restitutes to scientific phenomenon its life, is art."

  This was the substance of our second talk.

  He knew that it was a shock to me, his asking for the diary.

  "But why did you bring it, if it was not to offer it to me, to wish someone would read it? Whom was it written for, originally?"

  "For my father."

  "Did your father ever read it?"

  "Only the first few volumes, which were in French. He cannot read English."

  "Here in your diary we have the story written by the woman herself, and yet it is essentially the same story we find in tradition. It may well be that you thought yourself at fault when your father left you, that you felt you had disappointed or failed him in some way, as your mother did. So you tried to win him back by telling him 'stories' which would distract, please him (Scheherazade). It was the story of your faithfulness to his image. Revealing yourself to your father, you thought he would grow to know you, love you. You told him everything, but with charm and humor. And in this way you were reunited with him long before you found him again, in fact, from the moment you began to write the diary, probably with this compelling motivation, of making a link, a bridge to him."

  "But then when I found him, the first time, why did I abandon him?"

  "You had to abandon him first, to complete the cycle. You had to fulfill the obsession to be reunited with him, but also to liberate yourself from the fatalistic determinism of your whole life, of being the abandoned one. When you lost him as a child, you lost in him the personification of your ideal self. He was the artist, musician, writer, builder, socially fascinating personage. When you found him, you were a young woman in search of your real self. This your father could not give you, because the relationship was only a reflection of the past, of child and father love. This had to be broken so you might find a man independently of this image. Your father, as far as I can make out, is still trying to create you to his own image."

  After a while, he added: "Man is always trying to create a woman who will fill his needs, and that makes her untrue to herself. Many of your 'roles' came out of this desire to fulfill man's needs."

  One day Dr. Rank told me about his childhood. He was born in 1884 in Vienna, Austria. At an early age he was put to work in a glass blower's factory because his mother was a widow. But he was a great reader. He spent all his evenings at the library. He came across the books of Freud. He adopted his interpretations.

  Then he became ill. His lungs were not very strong. A friend took him to Dr. Alfred Adler. During his physical examination they talked, and Dr. Rank expounded some of his opinions of Dr. Freud's work. He also expressed some dissensions. He was already exploring the possibility of a memory of the body, a visceral memory in the blood, in the muscles, long before consciousness, as a child's first awareness of pain or pleasure, a memory of actual birth. A memory which started with birth itself. The experience of birth. Emotions formed like geological strata, from purely animal experiences. Birth, warmth, cold, pain.

  Adler was so impressed with Rank that he introduced him to Freud. Freud offered him a secretarial job and the possibility of study. He became a pupil of Freud's in 1905 and for twenty years was his assistant and collaborator. From their first talk, Freud recognized in Rank a fecund and original mind. The men who surrounded Freud were awed and acquiescent. Not Rank. Freud enjoyed the disparities and the clashes of opinions. Rank learned, but he also questioned. Rank was surrounded by older, more scholarly and disciplined disciples of Freud. But he became his research worker, his proofreader, his adopted son. Freud made him editor of the Psychoanalytical Review. He gave Rank a ring (which Rank showed me and was wearing) and wanted him to marry his daughter, to be his heir, and continue his work.

  Freud tried to analyze Rank, but this was a failure. Perhaps because they were too closely bound, perhaps because Rank was the rebel son and he was beginning to disagree with Rank's ideas. Freud did not like the concept of the Birth Trauma, nor Rank's ideas on illusion and reality. Like all fathers he wanted a duplicate of himself. But he understood Rank's explorative mind, and he was objective. Even their disagreements on theories would not have separated them. The real cleavage was achieved by the others, who wanted a group united by a rigid acceptance of Freud's theories. In 1919 Rank founded a publishing organization to concentrate psychoanalytical literature in one enterprise. While in Vienna, Rank was chairman of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society, and general secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

  This closeness caused much jealousy among Freud's collaborators. They hoped for a fissure. Even though Rank's discoveries were dedicated to Freud, Freud could never quite forgive him for differing from his established concepts. He began to consider Rank's explorations a threat to his own work. The other disciples worked actively to point up the estrangement, to add to it. Dr. Rank was made to feel so alienated from the group that he finally went to practice in France. This was the break in the father and son relationship. In 1926 he resigned from his Vienna offices and moved definitely to Paris, feeling he could no longer adhere to the old psychoanalytical school. After twenty years they had succeeded in banishing him. He not only lost a father but a master, a world, a universe. In Paris he worked alone. His book had placed him on the periphery of academic psychology.

  In earlier writings Rank had applied a Freudian theory to literary and cultural studies, but in 1924 he published a volume entitled Trauma of Birth, laying the foundation for a new philosophy of life. This contribution of his own he has developed, since then, in a number of books. His last three works have been translated into English under the titles, Modern Education, a Critique of Its Fundamental Ideas; Art and Artist; and Creative Urge and Personality Development.

  He became the director of the Psychological Center in Paris.

  Rank had begun to consider the neurotic as a failed artist, as a creative personality gone wrong. Neurosis was a malfunction of the imagination. Rank did not treat neurotics with the contempt that some doctors did, as the old doctors treated insanity. There was also, in neurotic guilt, a symptom of the religious spirit, the negative expression of religiousness, and the negative aspect of creation.

  His saying this reminded me that while I had been reading the lives of the romantics, I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream (in other centuries by tuberculosis and all the other romantic illnesses).

  And now I could see that Dr. Rank had become himself a father, had written his own books, evolved his own theories.

  First, he seized upon the diary as a shell, and as a defense. Then he asked me not to write it any more, and this was as difficult as asking a drug addict to do without his drugs. Not content with that, he asked me to live alone for a while, to disentangle my real self from all my "roles," to free myself of the constellation of relationships and identifications.

  I started from a complete acceptance of Dr. Rank's definition of the neurotic: the failed artist, the one in whom the creative spark exists but is deformed, arrested, feeble, hindered in some way, by some disorder of the creative faculties which finally succeeds in creating only neurosis. Therefore it is by a re-enacting of the process of creation that the
analyst can arrive at a liberation of it. This miracle of contagion which the analyst must perform can only be done by the closest approximation of creation itself.

  I was watching Dr. Rank in action. First of all, he took the image of today, the pattern of my life in the present. To come close to others I had surrendered many of my beliefs and attitudes. But closeness achieved by such compromises and abdications is not genuine.

  When my father appeared, I realized how many things I had been in rebellion against, in open mutiny, I should say, which had been merely a way to blaspheme, to desecrate, to repudiate his values, order, harmony, balance, and classical lucidity.

  Dr. Rank immediately clarified my relationship to June. It was not Lesbianism. I was imitating my father, courting women.

  "You replace the lost object of your love by imitating him. It was also an act of fear of man's sensuality which had caused you so much sorrow as a child." (I knew all the storms and wars at home were due to my father's interest in women.)

  I became my father. I was the intellectual adviser of my mother. I wrote. I read books.

  "And what about music?" asked Rank.

  "No, music I repudiated. I don't know why. I love it, I have a strong emotional response to it, but I refused to become a musician."

  Mental surgery, liberation of the instincts, the pure knowledge of deformation is not sufficient, as Allendy carried it out. It is a process of creation. The analyst has to communicate, to impart the capacity to create, and for self-creation. He has in his favor the power to arouse faith, but no matter how profound his perception, the final effort had to be made by me.

  Now, with Allendy, I felt that certain definite categorizations, overlooking the creative, the metaphysical, were reductions, in order to fit me into a general pattern.

  Dr. Rank, on the contrary, expanded his insight.

  With Allendy, I was an ordinary woman, a full human being, a simple and naive one; and he would exorcise my disquietudes, vague aspirations, my creations which sent me out into dangerous realms.