Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  We left that in suspense, and he went into another problem: my excessive need of truth to balance my facility for imagining, my fear of this imagination, the fear of what happens to the truth in my mind, so fertile with inventions. A great passion for accuracy because I know what is lost by the perspective or objectivity of art. My desire to be true to the immediate moment, the immediate mood.

  Dr. Rank questioned the validity of this. The artist, he said, is the deformer, and inventor. We do not know which is the truth, the immediate vision or the later one.

  We talked about how Henry "deformed" and never understood people. Rank said that was the true nature of the artist. Genius is invention.

  Then we talked about the realism of women, and Rank said that perhaps that was why women had never been great artists. They invented nothing. It was a man, not a woman, who invented the soul.

  I asked Rank whether the artists whose art was a false growth, an artificial excrescence, bearing no relation to their personal truth, insincere artists, were greater than sincere ones. Rank said this was a question which he had not yet answered for himself. "I may have to write a book for you, to answer it," he said.

  This statement gave me great pleasure. I said, "That would please me more than if I finished my own novel."

  "There's the woman in you speaking," said Dr. Rank. "When the neurotic woman gets cured, she becomes a woman. When the neurotic man gets cured, he becomes an artist. Let us see whether the woman or the artist will win out. For the moment, you need to become a woman."

  This was the most joyous moment of the analysis. I feel that what restitutes to scientific phenomena their life is the naive, emotional rediscovery of each problem as an individual miracle, the faith in the uniqueness of it which leads to enthusiastic unraveling. What kills life is the absence of mystery. But even the scientists today, however advanced their inroads into significance, admit a final and even more interesting ultimate mystery. Nothing is lost to the lover of shadows and darkness. Mystery remains.

  But what is living is the constant motion towards unraveling, a dynamic movement from mystery to mystery; otherwise one remains faced with a single one (mystery of the origin of fire, for instance). And such a static mystery becomes a restriction. Mystery born of ignorance, of taboos, fear, ignorance.

  But today, in digging deeper, the universe of our character has become greatly enlarged, unlimited in space. It exists in depth and is far more reaching. We do not strike walls or obstacles by discovery, by tampering with the soul, the unconscious, but are tapping new sources of mystery, new realms. We are relinquishing second-rate mysteries for greater and deeper ones. We are no longer frightened by lightning, or storms, but are discovering these dangers lie in our own nature. We are discovering the symbolic significance of fact, even of a sexual act, which is not always a physical act.

  The fear that truth should prove uninteresting is known only to weak-stomached artists. Respect the mysteries, they say. Do not open Pandora's box. Poetic vision is not the outcome of blindness but of a force which can transcend the ugliest face of reality, swallow and dissolve it by its strength, not evasion.

  Dr. Rank said, "Too limited a meaning has been placed upon the sexual experience, and although it is wrong to say that psychoanalysis brings merely a sexual liberation, this is only a phase, a step in the progress. Sexual liberation does not make a man or a woman, does not bring on maturity. The gesture, which some analysts take as a sufficient sign of liberation, is, in itself, empty of power and effect if it does not correspond to a complete inner transformation and preparedness for an exteriorization of maturity."

  He added, "This true maturity comes from far deeper sources, and is far more inner than is supposed by the scientific analyst when he pronounces himself satisfied after the patient has won a physical victory, or a sexual victory. In psychoanalysis we still see the consequences of this, in the fallacy that because sexuality is obviously biologically fundamental, it must also play the leading role."

  He also said, "Thus psychology has become the worst enemy of the soul."

  It is not necessarily a shock received in childhood which may have turned a woman away from thoughts of sex. It is not alone that she may have been offended by her father's infidelities to her mother and that this may have created a resentment against the cause of this attitude and neglect. There may be another cause, Rank suggested. There is an existing creative urge which makes certain demands on the nature, and orders a certain deviation of energies into other channels. Not all flights of mysticism or imagination are escapes from life. Creation, too, whose importance Rank alone recognizes (for it's a noticeable weakness of psychoanalysis that it has overlooked the artist as a separate entity), is a source of action, a directive which alters the course of human life.

  And then we came to my playing of roles. I wanted to be the woman Artaud needed, to feed his poetry, and rescue him from madness. I wanted to be the decorative and charming "salon" writer and classically decorous artist my father wanted. I wanted to be the woman not born of Adam's rib but of his needs, his invention, his images, his patterns.

  "The capacity of the artist, through the imagination, to lose himself in a hundred roles, is the same imaginative process of self-dissolution described as identification. It is not only the human parents. (You wanted to be both like your father in brilliance, talent, and like your self-effacing, saintly grandmother who was your ideal of a woman.) It is also the fiction heroines, the literary models you sought to emulate."

  "Yes, there was a time when June, Henry, and I were all Dostoevskian characters."

  "Psychoanalysis sometimes overlooks the importance of the imagination, the production of an artist, white I see the revelatory character of it, as well as its value for a 'cure'; for it is by an expansion and satisfactory expression in art that the balance alone can be readjusted."

  "Henry once wrote: 'I must either go mad immediately or write another book.'"

  "What you lose, you re-create. When you lost Europe, Spain, music, your atmosphere, you wrote a diary to carry your world with you, build another."

  Once, as I arrived, I caught a glimpse of a small, rather thin woman dressed all in black like a widow. I asked Rank who she was. He told me, "It is my wife. A short time before we married, she lost her father. I thought, then, that her wearing black and mourning was rather natural. But she has remained bereaved and grieving; she remained a widow. Compare this permanent mourning with your immediate efforts to create something in place of what you lost. That is the artist."

  Dr. Rank seemed to be saying that there is a metaphysics of the artist. Viewing everything from the creative angle, that is, the activity which transcends our human life, the artist enlarges the boundaries of our whole life. Compare Rank's interpretation of guilt with the interpretation of the average psychoanalyst. He feels that guilt comes from a far deeper source than a child's offense against moral laws. There is the sense of guilt of the creator. The artist (or the failed artist, the neurotic) takes from the world. He receives impressions, he absorbs colors, pleasurable sensations, he is a witness or a part of experiences of all kinds, he travels, he enjoys beauty, he relaxes in nature; and he feels committed to love this in return, to emulate creation, to celebrate, to worship, to admire, to preserve. There is, according to Rank, a guilt about not creating, as well as a guilt for destroying.

  When I wrote so many stories beginning, "I am an orphan," the obvious interpretation first touched upon, even by Rank himself, was that this was a fantasy of a desire to get rid of the parents in order to be able to assert my own individuality; but in looking further, he interpreted this as the creator's desire to be born a hero, self-born, a mythical birth.

  For a moment I felt or divined the man behind the analyst Rank. A warm, compassionate, divinatory, gentle, expansive man. Behind the eyes, which appeared at first analytical, I saw now the eyes of a man who had known great pain, great dissatisfactions, and who understood the abysms, the darkest and the deepest, the sa
ddest...

  It was only a flash. It was as if he, too, were enjoying the soft human moment. He knew, perhaps, that the woman would soon fade because there was no role for her; that the woman's role to live for a man, for one man, was denied to me by my neurosis; and that to live fragmented was a negation of the wholeness of woman. And he knew that I would be driven back to art.

  I feel that I am missing the overtones. For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.

  When we were talking again about June, he said, "To explain homosexuality by identification with the mother for the man, or with the father for the woman, is not enough. There is in it a trespassing beyond boundaries by which creation is expressed: a dominating energy which expands to fecundate on a plane which is difficult to apprehend and which bears a small relation to ordinary sexual activity."

  Dr. Rank has an agile, leaping quality of mind. I see him always as the man with very open eyes and I hear his favorite phrase which he repeats with elation: "You see? You see, eh?" And there is more, there is always more. He is inexhaustible. When he shrugs his shoulders, then I know that he has dismissed the unessential. He has a sense of the essential, the vital. His mind is always focused. His understanding never wavers. Expansion. A joyous fertility of ideas. The gift for elevating incident into destiny.

  It is said that the process of psychoanalysis is the one by which we are made to relive the drama of the obstacle against which we always repetitiously stumble, but this re-enacting, for Rank, cannot be limited to the event in the life which caused the "stuttering" (my word, for neurosis to me always seems like a stuttering of the soul in life). It must include an exercise in creation.

  My father left: love means abandonment and tragedy, either be abandoned or abandon first, etc. Not only the leap over the obstacle of fatality, but a complete artistic rehearsal of the creative instinct which is a leap beyond the human through a complete rebirth, or perhaps being born truly for the first time. To accomplish this it was not sufficient that I should relive the childhood which accustomed me to pain. I must find a realm as strong as the realm of my bondage to sorrow, by the discovery of my positive, active individuality. Such as my power to write, which Rank seized upon as the most vital core of my true maturity.

  To heal or release, alone, is not enough; but to teach the creation of a world in which one can live, on what plane, by what pattern, this can only be done by a vision into potentials, a vision into the capacities of the neurotic.

  Dr. Rank's soul-seeking man, the artist, seeks not only a victory over his nightmares or weaknesses, but a positive creation.

  I still wonder if it is not the presence of the man Rank which imparts the wisdom he gives. I find it difficult to retain exact phrases. His presence, his being, conveys all kinds of subtle teachings. He defeats the past, its obsessive clutching hold, more by the fact of his enthusiasm, his interest, his adventurousness, his war against conventions than by any simple statement. It is his aliveness which sings the funeral rites of dead emotions, dead memories.

  "In conventional analysis there comes that well-known moment of inflation of the ego, in which one feels the power of release, the sheer power of being able to advance, to move, to act, to decide, to desire, and to realize. But the inflation cannot last. The analyst here, in his role of god or devil, has released a power without properly hinging it, canalizing it. Thus, without the support of the positive creation awaiting the released one, as it were, we find the lamentable man who is dispersing his newborn energies, and only experiences a momentary joy in movement."

  Every idea of his could give birth to a book. Yet he regrets not having written a novel, and this amazed me. He may be more of an artist than a scientist. When he was young, he had written plays. In Vienna they thought his pen name was Bruckner, that he had written Bruckner's plays. This may be what prevented him from getting the recognition he deserves. He is considered a rebel, a desecrator of the conventions of Vienna analysts.

  More and more, it seems to me, the generative, fruitful principles of analysis which lay in the reconstitution and re-enacting of the individual's drama, were overshadowed by the eagerness to find the diagnosis and classifiableness, in order to maintain an intellectual control over them. Each time the artificial process of the drama's reconstruction was done with less respect for the drama, and a greater respect for the pattern of the drama, then the fruitful elements were diminished.

  One might say that it is natural that a mechanical feeling should arise in the analyst who is confronted, say, a hundred times a year with a drama of incest; but if he had not hastened to the conclusion that all dramas of incest resemble each other, he would not have lost the vital interest in how or why the incest drama developed. It is very much like demanding a sincere participation on the part of the analyst; and no such participation would be possible if we did not refer back to the feelings of an artist when he is about to paint, for the thousandth time, the portrait of the Virgin and Child. The real artist is never concerned with the fact that the story has been told, but in the experience of reliving it; and he cannot do this if he is not convinced of the opportunity for individual expression which it permits.

  Otto Rank should not be confused with the other psychoanalysts. He uses the same language, the same method, but he transcends the psychoanalytical theories and writes more as a philosopher, as a metaphysician.

  The axis of psychoanalysis is displaced by Rank, and the preoccupation becomes a metaphysical or creative one. It is this emphasis I want to make clear, for a great popular confusion tends to classify all psychoanalysts more or less in the same pragmatic category: as doctors and not as seers, as healers and not as philosophers. Even though they deal with psychic illness, illness of the soul, the cure they offer is vaguely understood to be a sexual one.

  Rank's creative attitude situates the drama on an emotional plane, saving it from mere mental surgery. The acceptance of life as drama is art, not science.

  The scientific attitude skeletonizes the personality and produces a contraction, a reduction to phenomena. Otto Rank emphasizes the difference between individualities and produces the expansion of it. The stressing of differences enlarges his universe. Rank seeks and delineates the individual mold into which each one is helped to enter, his own mold, as against the general mold imposed by scientific analysis.

  Scientific analysis, in its effort to simplify, in order to conclude, restricts the outline of the personality and slowly creates a kind of disillusion, or impoverishment. The emphasis is laid on the explanation, not on the expression of the drama. Rank's artistic interest in the drama has an incalculable effect on the living experience of the neurotic.

  It is his artistic, creative attitude which is contagious and which differentiates him from the scientific analysts. The average Freudian analyst is a purely analytical type, bored by the variations on eternal themes. Rank prizes the variations as precious indications of the character, color, nature of the neurotic's imagination, a key to be used later in helping him to construct his own world.

  The scientific rigidity acts very much like a trap, the trap of rationalization. The patient who is a hypersensitive person cannot help being influenced by what he is expected to say, by the quick classification baring the structure too obviously. The neurotic feels his next statement is expected to fit into a logical continuity whose pressure he finally succumbs to.

  The more this process becomes clear to him, the more he experiences a kind of discouragement with the banality of it. The "naming" of his trouble, being in itself so prosaic, links it to his physical diseases, and deprives him of that very illusion and creative halo which is necessary to the re-creation of a human being. Instead of discovering the poetic, imaginative, creative potentialities of his disease (since every neurotic fantasy is really a twisted, aborted work of art), he discovers the de-poetization of it, which makes of him a cripple instead of a potential artist.

&nb
sp; With Rank he discovers the contrary: his affinity with history, with the myth, with philosophy, with art and religion. He is restored to the flow of life and his disease is discovered to be a manifestation of imagination, the very stuff of creation itself, only deformed and perverted. Reality is not merely the realism he could not face, but a reality he has the power to transform and shape to his needs.

  The generative, fruitful principle of analysis lies in the reconstruction and reconstitution of the individual drama as an artist achieves it—with enthusiasm for its development, a passion for its expression, color, and ramifications. It is this attitude which is necessary to his salvation.

  To raise the drama instead of diminishing it, by linking it to the past, to collective history, to literature, achieves two things: one, to remove it from the too-near, personal realm where it causes pain; the other, to place the neurotic as a part of a collective drama, recurrent through the ages, so that he may cease regarding himself as a cripple, as a degenerate type. Such a wide participation in human experience, coming from the analyst, is only possible if he takes the attitude of the artist, who is not so much concerned with the pure ideological structure of his book as with the lyrical or dramatic expression of it.

  It is in this difference between individual expression that we find a new dimension, a new climate, a new vision. To reduce a fantasy is only a means of dredging the neurotic imagination, of diminishing the stage on which the neurotic must live out his drama with the maximum of intensity, for the sake of catharsis.

  Rank has given the neurotic his full importance as a potentially creative human being. The world of false inner reality which he has constructed, like the one constructed by the madman, can easily be transmuted into a truer inner reality with the power of affecting its surroundings rather than being destroyed by them.