by Anais Nin
I think about him while I answer his telephone and sort his mail. "Dr. Rank will be back at the end of February. This is Dr. Rank's assistant speaking. Yes, he is on a lecture tour."
Rank's writing does not do justice to his ideas. He translates mentally from German. He is only concerned with meaning. When I read him what I write he extracts the meaning, he does not notice the form or expression.
He wants me to rewrite all his books with my "French conciseness." He is a philosopher, not an artist. The poet is in love, a lover. The philosopher is a commentator.
Just before he left he talked again about his childhood, his great love of the theatre. He went hungry to see a play. He needed to talk about himself. He said: "I have never met anybody with such an interest in human beings as you have, Anaïs." I unleashed a flow of confidences. He had written poetry, and plays, he had wanted to be a writer before he came into contact with Dr. Freud. I resuscitated a submerged part of Rank's personality. "I have not talked about myself for thirty years, or even before that."
What will happen to this writer who lived mute and concealed behind the mask of the doctor?
I had told Rank the story of Richard Osborn [see Diary, 1931–1934] and his dual life in Paris. He became interested in his conflict between being a lawyer for an American bank by day and leading a Bohemian life at night, and his breakdown. From all I told Rank he felt that Osborn should not have been placed in an asylum. "In the first place, he shows definite symptoms of guilt, and where there is guilt there is a possibility of curing him, and in the second place his symptoms are not the kind which develop into violence."
I asked Rank if he would help him. Rank offered to visit Osborn and to talk to the people who had committed him.
He rented a car and we drove to the asylum in Connecticut. I expected this visit from Rank to be very effective, because Richard Osborn had read his books and had heard Henry talk about him. I waited in the car. Rank disappeared behind huge doors. He returned sooner than I expected.
As we drove back he told me what had happened. "I asked to see Osborn. They consented, and they brought Osborn to the waiting room, and left us alone. I said: 'I am Doctor Otto Rank.' He stared at me, then smiled ironically, and said: 'So you say,' and he turned his back on me and left the room. That was the end of our talk."
In spite of the fact that this meant Osborn had just lost a chance to be freed, I could not help laughing.
Henry is writing a story about murder in the Paris suburbs. After that he flew into one of his best lyrical moods, reeling off feverish pages for Black Spring, pages on dreams, pouring out images.
[February, 1935]
One of the patients Rank sent me was a violinist in an orchestra. I will call her "Emily."
Lying on the day-couch, and I sitting where I cannot be seen, everyone looks vulnerable. Looking first at the hair, then at the brow, down the line of the nose, the mouth, in the pose of sleep, without the defensive masks, every human being looks helpless.
She came in walking like a young man, it is true, wearing flat shoes and a soiled raincoat, her hair tousled and short, walking with a masculine thrust of the shoulder. But when she took off her shoes and I saw the delicate shape of her feet, and noticed the sensitivity of her hands as she pushed her hair away from her frightened face, I knew she was a girl pretending to be boyish, or a girl who did not dare to be a woman. Her experience of man consisted in having once used a toothbrush as a substitute lover and deciding she did not like it.
She was the first one who had dared to come, for in doing so she had eluded the absolute tyranny of the conductor, a woman I will call "Marcia."
Emily played her wistful and plaintive melody for me—life in a small town in the South before coming to New York, fears, frustrations. Everything was sinful: laughter, dancing, dressing up, charm, and the plant that was Emily was stunted by so many prohibitions. When she first began to play in Marcia's orchestra, Marcia's total freedom of action and thought liberated her, but at the cost of utter dependence on Marcia.
She talked endlessly about her many "crimes." They were small and harmless but they weighed on her. Analysis at times resembles a Catholic confession: I have done this and that, I need absolution, I cannot sleep at night remembering I once wished my sister dead, and she became ill and she died. When she plays the violin she feels she is wooing people, and wishing to charm them so they will love her, and that is wrong.
Emily was not only concerned with her own paralysis, but also about the destructive effect of Marcia's domineeringness on the other musicians.
She felt stronger after a few talks, she felt she was beginning to escape the power of Marcia. Could she bring her friends to me? She was beginning not to feel helpless and hypnotized.
Before Rank left for the West, our last conversation was about my assertion that woman's notorious inadequacy in grasping ideas was only relative. She could not grasp abstract ideas, but she was able to transpose them by humanizing or rather personifying them. But once they were embodied, concretized in a person, then she grasped them perhaps more profoundly, because she grasped and experienced them emotionally, and they could affect and transform her. But they are the same ideas which move men through their minds.
Now analysis is revealing how little objectivity there is in man's thinking. Even in the most rational man, there is a fund of irrational motivations which are personal, and belong to his personal past, to his emotional traumas. So in the end, pure thought rarely exists in its abstract form, it is part of the experience and of the emotions. A synthesis. Invention, discovery, creation, history and philosophy are composed of all these elements. Man generalizes from experience, and denies the source of his generalizations. Woman individualizes and personalizes, but ultimately analysis will reveal that the rationalizations of man are a disguise to his personal bias, and that woman's intuition was nothing more than a recognition of the influence of the personal in all thought.
Rank, who partakes of the two activities, could admit this. He spends his days exposing the fallacies of rationalizations.
My patients multiplied at a frightening rate. I have barely time to pick up my Continental breakfast, to dress, and already the telephone is ringing, and patients are at the door. There is an entrance hall about two yards long between the door and the day-couch on which they lie. Before they lie down I can tell how they feel. I am sitting against the light in a deep armchair. There is only one small window high above Central Park. The smoke of cigarettes fills the small room. And even when the radio is turned off I can hear the faint sounds of music from other rooms. It is the background music of New York. The voices of patients, sad, shrill, loud, whispering, tired, animated, colorful, weary, hoarse, strong, thin, lisping, foreign. The faces of patients, with eyelids down, as if their eyes were now watching an interior drama; the young man who cannot love anyone; the sister who can only love her brother; the writer who cannot write; the man obsessed with politics who cannot take sides; tears, laughter, rages, sullen silences: they fill the small room.
One day I saw so many tears fall that when I found a puddle of water near my door I first thought it was all the weeping, and then I saw the umbrella that had been forgotten weeping on the rug. On other clear, sharp, cold days of snow, of frost on the window, patients came thankful for warmth, for a rest, for a moment of intimacy with themselves. Strange, the loss of the self is a greater sickness than the self's impostor, the ego. The ego is the caricature people mistake for the self, the ego is the fraud, the actor, the transvestite of the self.
Lost selves, confused selves, blind selves. When the real self is born the ego vanishes.
Here lies the remedy against anger, the counter poison which the world has chosen to denigrate and overlook. How many hard, non-human people I have seen melt before my eyes and become human again. How many angers were dissolved, how many false attitudes abandoned, how many hatreds cured.
I have seen twisted and impotent people become constructive, creative, hum
an. Above all, I have seen that the most frequent source of anger is impotence. Hostility is jealousy. Destructiveness is a sign of impotence.
[March, 1935]
When Rank came back I was at the station. He had fallen in love with the West. He was enthusiastic about its climate, its relaxed life.
Then he sat down and read my reports on the patients. He approved them all. He said: "You have a gift for this."
Some think analysis is an artificial process because it is a hothouse process, a forced feeding, a hastening of growth. Biologically life continues to evolve by its own rhythms, by its own errors. Analysis becomes necessary only when growth is stunted, when the flaws strangulate growth.
At times analysis creates another form of idealization. Too much is demanded of it. While analyzing so many people I realized the constant need of a mother, or a father, or a god (the same thing) is really immaturity. It is a childish need, a human need, but so universal that I can see how it gave birth to all religions. Will we ever be able to look for this strength in ourselves? Some men have. They have also gone mad with loneliness. Woman will be the last one on earth to learn independence, to find strength in herself. My patients turn away from those they love or are loved by when this need is unfulfilled. The feminine young man who came, obviously incomplete, obviously half-woman, was looking for a man who would add to his feeble manhood, a completion.
They demand of love also the fulfillment of a need, a need for growth, and it is in terms of this need that they often sacrifice the love; or are guilty of injustice. I was guilty of the same injustice when I looked for a strength in any man whom I called "the father."
Analysis gives vision into the potential self. At times it also gives false hopes, because the potential self cannot always develop. We have loyalties to the past, commitments, promises made, human responsibilities.
The pale winter sun is shining on what I write. I write while I wait for patients. I write after they leave, I write while eating my dinner, at times instead of dinner. I write lying down on a rust-colored bedspread, with the radio humming over my head. On my dressing table there is a Japanese garden in a bowl. Messages from my patients, and books they bring me.
Rank divides his time between New York and Philadelphia.
I made a strange discovery. I was glad to return to a life not constantly analyzed by Rank.
The diary written at odd moments, between patients.
As always my life continues like a musical score, always on several lines at once. By day I am self-effacing, I am confessor and doctor, but in the evenings I lead my own life. Invited to the Wagner's Fifth Avenue palace, butlers with white gloves, eighteenth-century furniture, white walls, gold-rimmed mirrors, and always at the end the lovely quiet drive back in a big car, with a fur rug on the knees. Spent one Saturday afternoon at their Long Island estate, watching a polo game, and when I admired the best horse with the same intuition about horses that I have of wines, Mr. Wagner said: "You're the finest bred woman I have ever known, fine breed." This amused me, and I was laughing in the foyer, on my way upstairs to dress formally, when Mrs. Wagner leaned over the banister on the first floor and from the tone in which she said: "What are you laughing at so merrily?" I understood immediately the whole tone of their marriage, her paleness, her over-seriousness, over-dignity, and his red-flushed, round face and joyousness.
I am getting so I can guess a tragedy from the flicker of an eyelid. Too much. Too much.
It is what Proust called his X-ray, and mine works overtime, at fancy dinners, at movies, at cocktails, walking through the city.
Patients come and go, they come from all levels of society, rich, poor, ignorant or cultured. The rich are insulated but this only increases the split from reality. If there is no noise from the outside, there is also no weeping, no laughter, no intense living either. A few cannot pay. Emily says: "I am well, but don't send me away. This is the most wonderful thing which ever happened to me."
She has a religious attitude towards analysis.
Analysis accelerates growth, maturity, but changes come more slowly than insight. The patterns have deep roots and take time to change.
I avoid all clinical language because as a writer I believe language has power. I also take much trouble to describe each character, each motivation as unique, not to give the patients the feeling of being classified.
Science may heal, but it is the poetic illumination of life which makes my patients fall in love with life, which makes them recover their appetite for it. I avoid labels and the hospital atmosphere.
Rank was at first uncertain about this emphasis on language. I wanted to avoid the algebra of emotion, mathematical human equations, to bring it all back into the realm of a living drama.
Finally he said: "Yes, you are right. Words are magical. Freud did much in his analysis of the patient's language as a key to his problems, but you are, as a writer, studying the power of the analyst's use of words to affect the patient."
Then he returned to his obsession that I should rewrite his books, condense and clarify them. He would have a rough translation made of A Study of Incest in Literature. It was a six-hundred-page book. It would be a lifetime task. I would have to abdicate my own writing. Already I was shying of too much analysis. Intellectual banquets. Orgies of ideas. The force of a man's ideological creation, and the human tragedy of it. His wisdom attracts people to him. "I am like a rich man who fears to be loved only for his money." He is lonely in his world of ideas.
Henry, meanwhile, is writing, but also trying to get published. He was asked to expurgate Tropic of Cancer. He rebelled against compromises, against pragmatism, commercialism. He felt defeated and frustrated. Life in New York seems mechanical and drab to him.
One night Rank was taken to the opera by an enormously wealthy man he had cured. At midnight he telephoned me from downstairs. Could he come up for five minutes? When I opened the door he was hidden by a giant basket of Bowers he had been given and wanted to bring to me. He also wanted to display Dr. Otto Rank the Viennese, all dressed up in his new tailored evening suit with cape, top hat, and patent-leather shoes. He came in, and like an actor, he leaped on the couch, took off his hat like a famous singer receiving an ovation, bowed and said: "The ovation should have been for me, because I made the singer sing his best, I made the rich man back the opera." He bowed to an imaginary, applauding public. He sang a fragment of a Viennese opera, leaped down, and vanished.
Henry said: "In New York I fear to be swallowed back into drabness, limited surroundings, slavery." His childhood. He cannot bear to live as he lived before.
I feel the need to swing away from constant explanations. I want to run away from too much consciousness, too much awareness. At night, I seek dancing, friendships, nature, forgetfulness, music, or sleep.
Just as I wrote this, a woman threw herself out of her window on the seventeenth floor. So one we did not take care of decided to die, not too far from help. I cannot help all the sick. I feel like the king in Dreiser's parable. I have no more free time. They call at night and haunt my dreams.
Henry has written more lyrical passages, as good as the first pages of Black Spring he wrote in Clichy. My faith in Henry as a writer absolute.
Rank thinks my diary invaluable as a study of a woman's point of view. He says it is a document by a woman who thinks as a woman, not like a man.
When I heard the orchestra tuning up I was reminded of all that Henry includes in his books which I once called the "tuning up," and which I felt should not be there, should be removed later like a scaffolding. But Henry likes those moments when the instruments are not yet in tune.
"If I am an artist, as you say I am," said Henry, "then everything I do is right."
"But the artist has to include a critic."
Is this the way Henry keeps his writing alive, by letting it follow the casual, accidental patterns of life itself?
Rank gave a lecture on the psychology of woman. He says I have added to his knowledge
of woman. He always wanted to write poetically and dramatically and what I am writing he feels is the poetry and drama of neurosis. So the man who took the diary away from me as neurosis gives it back to me as a unique work by his enthusiasm for it.
When I write in the first person, I feel I am more honest than when a man generalizes.
In analysis I am quite willing to discuss with A. the guilt tragedies in Dostoevsky, knowing all the time he is speaking of his own guilts which he is unwilling to recognize or to name. I am quite willing to talk with B. about the hunger of China or India by which he expresses his own personal starvations. Man's language is that displacement from the personal to the impersonal, but this is another form of self-deception. The self in them is disguised, it is not absent as they believe.
Visited the Planetarium. It restored to me a sense of space and I could detach myself from the haunting patients. To walk in the snow with muffled steps, and into a replica of the sky.
I saw, instead of stars, relationships moving like constellations, moving away and towards each other, small, large, pale or vivid, warm or cold, diffuse or clear, and at times exploding. Trailing smoke and plumes, raining sparks, turning, moving, according to an invisible design, according to influences we have not yet been able to measure, analyze, contain.
Coming out again on the white carpet of snow. Silence as the snow falls. I took a long journey away from human tangles. I breathed space and order.