by Anais Nin
A few of these young women displayed a new anxiety. It was as though having lived so long under the direct or indirect domination of man (setting the style of their life, the pattern, the duties) they had become accustomed to it, and now that it was gone, now that they were free to make decisions, to be mobile, to speak their wishes, to direct their own lives, they felt like ships without rudders. I saw questions in their eyes. Was sensitivity felt as overgentle? Permissiveness as weakness? They missed authority, the very thing they had struggled to overcome. The old groove had functioned for so long. Women as dependents. A few women independent, but few in proportion to the dependent ones. The offer of total love was unusual. A love without egocentricity, without exigencies, without moral strictures. A love which did not define the duties of women (you must do this and that, you must help me with my work, you must entertain and further my career).
A love which was almost a twinship. No potentates, no dictators. Strange. It was new. It was a new country. You cannot have independence and dependence. You can alternate them equally, and then both can grow, unhampered, without obstacles. This sensitive man is aware of woman’s needs. He seeks to let her be. But sometimes women do not recognize that the elements they are missing are those which thwarted woman’s expansion, her testing of her gifts, her mobility, her development. They mistake sensitivity for weakness. Perhaps because the sensitive man lacks the aggressiveness of the macho man (which sends him hurtling through business and politics at tragic cost to family and personal relationships).
I met a young man, who although the head of a business by inheritance, did not expect his wife to serve the company, to entertain people not attractive to her, to assist in his contacts. She was free to pursue her own interests, which lay in psychology and training welfare workers. She became anxious that the two different sets of friends, his business associates and her psychologists, would create totally separate lives and estrange them. It took her a while to observe that her psychological experiences were serving his interests in another way. He was learning to handle those who worked for him in a more humanistic way. When an employee was found cheating while pumping the company’s gas to the other employees, he called him in and obtained his life history. He discovered the reason for the cheating (high hospital bills for a child) and remedied it instead of firing him, thus winning a loyal employee from then on. The couple’s interests, which seemed at first divergent, became interdependent.
Another couple decided that, both being writers, one would teach one year and leave the other free to write, and the other would take on teaching the next year. The husband was already a fairly well known writer. The wife had only published poems in magazines but was preparing a book of criticism. It was her turn to teach. He found himself considered a faculty member’s husband and was asked at parties, “Do you also write?” The situation could have caused friction. The wife remedied it by having reprinted in the school paper a review of her husband’s last novel, which established his standing.
Young women are engaging in political action when young men are withdrawing because of disillusionment. And the new woman is winning new battles. The fact that certain laws were changed renewed the faith of the new man. Women in politics are still at the stage of David and Goliath. They believe in the effect of a single stone! Their faith is invigorating when they and their husbands have sympathetic vibes, as they call it.
The old situation of the man obsessed with business, whose life was shortened by stress, and whose life ended at retirement, was reversed by a young wife who encouraged his hobby, painting, so that he retired early to enjoy art and travel.
In these situations the art of coordination manifests itself rather than the immature emphasis on irreconcilable differences. With maturity comes the sense that activities are interrelated and nourish one another.
Another source of bewilderment for the new woman is that many of the new men do not have the old ambitions. They do not want to spend their lives in the pursuit of a fortune. They want to travel while they are young, live in the present. I met them hitchhiking in Greece, Spain, Italy, France. They were living entirely in the present and accepting the hardships for the sake of the present adventures. One young woman felt physically unfit for the difficulties and carried a lot of vitamins in her one and only pack. She told me: “At first he made fun of me, but then he understood I was not sure I could take the trip physically, and he became as protective as possible. If I had married a conventional man, his concept of protection would have been to keep me home. I would not have enjoyed all these marvels I have discovered with David, who challenged my strength and made me stronger for it.” Neither one thought of surrendering the dream of travel while young.
One of the most frequent questions young women ask me is: How can a woman create a life of her own, an atmosphere of her own when her husband’s profession dictates their lifestyle? If he is a doctor, a lawyer, a psychologist, a teacher, the place they live in, the demands of the neighbors, all set the pattern of life.
Judy Chicago, the well-known painter and teacher, made a study of women painters and found that, whereas the men painters all had studios separate from the house, the women did not, and painted either in the kitchen or some spare room. But many young women have taken literally Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and rented studios away from the family. One couple who lived in a one-room house set up a tent on the terrace for the wife’s writing activities. The very feeling of “going to work,” the physical act of detachment, the sense of value given to the work by isolating it, became a stimulant and a help. To create another life, they found, was not a breaking away or separating. It is striking that for woman any break or separation carries with it an aura of loss, as if the symbolic umbilical cord still affected all her emotional life and each act were a threat to unity and ties.
This fear is in women, not in men, but it was learned from men. Men, led by their ambitions, did separate from their families, were less present for the children, were absorbed, submerged by their professions. But this happened to men and does not necessarily have to happen to women. The unbroken tie lies in the feelings. It is not the hours spent with husband or children, but the quality and completeness of the presence. Man is often physically present and mentally preoccupied. Woman is more capable of turning away from her work to give full attention to a weary husband or a child’s scratched finger.
If women have witnessed the father “going away” because of his work, they will retain anxiety about their own “going away” to meetings, conferences, lectures, or other professional commitments.
For the new woman and the new man, the art of connecting and relating separate interests will be a challenge. If women today do not want a nonexistent husband married to Big Business, they will accept a simpler form of life to have the enjoyment of a husband whose life blood has not been sucked by big companies. I see the new woman shedding many luxuries. I love to see them, simply dressed, relaxed, natural, playing no roles. For the transitional stage was woman’s delicate problem: how to pass from being submerged and losing her identity in a relationship, how to learn to merge without loss of self. The new man is helping by his willingness to change too, from rigidities to suppleness, from tightness to openness, from uncomfortable roles to the relaxation of no roles.
One young woman was offered a temporary teaching job away from home. The couple had no children. The young husband said: “Go ahead if that is what you want to do.” If he had opposed the plan, which added to her teaching credits, she would have resented it. But because he let her go, she felt he did not love her deeply enough to hold on to her. She left with a feeling of being deserted, while he felt her leaving also as a desertion. These feelings lay below the conscious acceptance. The four months’ separation might have caused a break. But the difference is that they were willing to discuss these feelings, to laugh at their ambivalence and contradictions.
If in the unconscious there still lie reactions we cannot control, at leas
t we can prevent them from doing harm to the present situation. If both were unconsciously susceptible to the fear of being deserted, they had to find a way to grow independent from a childhood pattern. Otherwise, enslaved by childhood fears, neither one could move from the house. In exposing them they were able to laugh at the inconsistency of wanting freedom and yet wanting the other to hold on.
Very often in the emerging new woman, the assertion of differences carries too heavy an indication of dissonances, disharmony, but it is a matter of finding the relationships, as we are finding the relationship between art and science, science and psychology, religion and science. It is not similarities that create harmony, but the art of fusing various elements that enrich life. Professional activities tend to demand almost too much concentration; this becomes a narrowing of experience for each one. The infusion of new currents of thoughts, stretching the range of interests, is beneficial to both men and women.
Perhaps some new women and new men fear adventure and change. The life of Margaret Mead indicates that she sought a man with the same passionate devotion to anthropology, but the result was that her husband studied the legends, the myths of the tribe, and she was left to study childbirth and the raising of children. So a common interest does not necessarily mean equality.
All of us carry seeds of anxieties left from childhood, but the determination to live with others in close and loving harmony can overcome all the obstacles, provided we have learned to integrate the differences.
Watching these young couples and how they resolve the problems of new attitudes, new consciousness, I feel we might be approaching a humanistic era in which differences and inequalities may be resolved without war.
Yoko Ono proposed the “feminization of society. The use of feminine tendencies as a positive force to change the world . . . We can evolve rather than revolt.”
The empathy these new men show woman is born of their acceptance of their own emotional, intuitive, sensory, and humanistic approach to relationships. They allow themselves to weep (men never wept), to show vulnerability, to expose their fantasies, share their inmost selves. Some women are baffled by the new regime. They have not yet recognized that to have empathy one must to some extent feel what the other feels. That means that if woman is to assert her creativity or her gifts, man has to assert his own crucial dislike of what was expected of him in the past.
The new type of young man I have met is exceptionally fitted for the new woman, but she is not yet totally appreciative of his tenderness, his growing proximity to woman, his attitude of twinship rather than differentiation. People who once lived under a dictatorship often are at a loss to govern themselves. This loss is a transitional one: It may mean the beginning of a totally new life and freedom. The man is there. He is an equal. He treats you like an equal. In moments of uncertainty you can still discuss problems with him you could not have talked about twenty years ago. Do not, I say to today’s women, please do not mistake sensitivity for weakness. This was the mistake which almost doomed our culture. Violence was mistaken for power, the misuse of power for strength. The subjection is still true in films, in the theater, in the media. I wanted the hero of Last Tango in Paris to die immediately. He was only destroyed at the end! The time span of a film. Will it take women as long to recognize sadism, arrogance, tyranny, reflected so painfully in the world outside, in war and political corruption? Let us start the new regime of honesty, of trust, abolishment of false roles in our personal relationships, and it will eventually affect the world’s history as well as women’s development.
WRITING, MUSIC, AND FILMS
On Truth and Reality
A lecture given at the meeting of The Otto Rank Association, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 28 October 1972; first published in the Journal of the Otto Rank Association, June 1973.
There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and our attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous. Such a book is Truth and Reality, by Otto Rank, which I read in my early thirties. Its French title is La Volonté du Bonheur (The Will to Happiness). I read every word, and it must have penetrated so very deeply to a place where I no longer was consciously aware of, into the depths of my subconscious. It was not an intellectual experience for me, but a deeply emotional one. So the meaning of this book, its guiding principles, sank into my unconscious and I did not read it again until, thanks to Virginia Robinson and Anita Faatz, I rediscovered it and found that my whole life as a woman artist had been influenced by it, and proved its wisdom.
I must have based myself on its principles. Dr. Rank stressed several goals, and I will refer later to how much more difficult it was for a woman to achieve them than for a man. In his book he speaks constantly about the “creative will.” I even forgot that expression and used instead my own, which is stubbornness. I said very often that I was more stubborn than other writers. I would not give up, I have never given up, but I didn’t call it creative will. It is a beautiful phrase.
This creative will sometimes manifests itself very early in life. At the age of nine I was in danger of losing my life. A doctor made a mistaken diagnosis and said I had tuberculosis of the hip and would never walk again. My instant reaction was to ask for pencil and paper and begin to make written portraits of my whole family, to write poems. I even put on the front page of these notes “Member of the French Academy,” which to me seemed the highest honor awarded to a writer. This is an attitude of defiance, it is actually the refusal to despair, the refusal to bow down to the human condition, human sorrows, human handicaps. Last-minute surgery saved my life. But this is where the writing began. It was a dramatization of the artist’s solution to the obstacles of life. All my life I have talked and written a great deal about the artist. It was often misunderstood as cultist, excluding nonartists and uncreative people, but this was not so. I love nonartists as well, but for me the artist simply means one who can transform ordinary life into a beautiful creation with his craft. But I did not mean creation strictly applied only to the arts, I meant creation in life, the creation of a child, a garden, a house, a dress. I was referring to creativity in all its aspects. Not only the actual products of art, but the faculty for healing, consoling, raising the level of life, transforming it by our own efforts. I was talking about the creative will, which Dr. Rank opposed to neurosis as our salvation. When I went to see him (I was twenty-eight years old or so) I felt oppressed and actually trapped by my human commitments, by the human condition particularly applied to woman with her training for devotion, service, loyalty to her personal world. I started with the usual handicaps which I share with so many: the broken home, uprooting to a strange country whose language I did not know. Everything contributed to create an alienated child. I found it extremely difficult to enter the flow of life, difficult and painful because there was always the double struggle which Dr. Rank describes in Truth and Reality: the conflict between being different and wanting to be close to others. I felt different but I longed for friendship and love. The struggle to maintain my difference was accentuated by the cultural contrasts and uprooting, the problem of language. I was holding on to the values I had been taught, yet I wanted to be admitted to the adopted culture. I finally learned the language, and actually fell in love with English. But the two cultures worked against my sense of unity, two cultures which were opposites, the European and the American.
When I went to see Dr. Rank, instead of tackling the immediate problems, the difficulties in my relationships, the conflicts of cultures, the conflicts between fiction writer and diarist, between woman and writer, he instantly realized the seriousness of my existence as a writer. He focussed on the strongest element in my divided and chaotic self. No matter what disintegrating influences I was experiencing, the writing was the act of wholeness. What he did was to practice his own philosophy, which was to disregard the negativities we usually bring
to the therapist and focus on the most positive element in my nature, which was the stubborn concern with writing. I was amazed that he left aside the human problems. Later I realized what a stroke of genius this was. First of all he asked me to put my diary down on his table, in other words to give it up as a hiding place, a place for secrets, for a separate existence. So I would share everything with him. I realized later he had shifted the whole problem of human life to the problem of the creative will, and that he was counting on this creative will to find its own solutions. He was challenging my creative will, and having strengthened that, I began to alter my personal life. The change came from within; it was a force which could solve conflicts and dualities. That is why I give the artist such importance, because he possesses this power from the beginning. Even in the darkest periods of social history, outer events would be changed if we had a center. It is only in the private world that we can learn to alchemize the ugly, the terrible, the horrors of war, the evils and cruelties of man, into a new kind of human being. I do not say turn away or escape. We cannot turn away from social history, because it is necessary to maintain our responsibilities to society, but we need to create a center of strength and resistance to disappointments and failures in outward events. Today I am working for causes which I consider worthwhile, but that is in the world of action, and the world from which we draw our wisdom, our lucidities, our power to act, our courage, is in this other world which is not an escape but a laboratory of the soul. It is this inner world Dr. Rank was eager to see us create, and for that he had to deliver us from the sense of guilt, inbred in us, towards individual growth. In Truth and Reality he does say that the culture tries to make us feel that the active individual is really endangering the growth of his fellow men. And I had this problem, in common with so many students today. When I talked about individual growth in order to have something to contribute to the collective, they thought I meant to turn away and take refuge in an ivory tower. For me it was the place where I did my most difficult spiritual work, where I practiced the confrontation of psychological obstacles, in order to be able to act and live in the world without despair and loss of faith. It was the place where I reconstructed what the outer world disintegrated. Because it is just as important to live outside of history as it is to live within it. Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it. Our American culture made a virtue of our living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center, and so we lost our center and had to find it again.