The Ghost of a Muse: A Psychologist’s Love of Anaïs Nin by Rebecca Marcelina Gimeno, PhD
“The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus
Diarist, author, lay-analyst, and muse, Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, widely known as Anaïs Nin, was a woman of many lives, appearances, and disguises. Becoming acquainted with Anais, is a bit of a labyrinthian task, but is also incredibly rewarding. This elusive woman, so ahead of her time, offered to the world gifts of creativity, insights into female sexuality, and the possibility of a life lived unapologetically and fully.
I have been reading and tending to the words and interior life of Anaïs since I was fifteen years old. I first encountered her erotic novel, Delta of Venus in a secondhand bookstore. I was immediately captured by the book’s sensual and suggestive book cover—I was still in high school after all. As I began to immerse myself in its pages, I became less interested in the tale itself, and instead, found myself mesmerized by the woman who wrote it. I imagined this woman in my mind. How fearless this woman must have been, this woman who wrote such sensual and carnal pages during a time, I assumed, when it was strange and magical for a woman to do so. She became my secret companion then, that very day, and it has been an evolving friendship and love affair ever since. I say secret because I have kept my connection to her very personal and intimate. Those who know I am enamored with her know little as to why. I have always wanted to keep her close to me, perhaps protectively. Her writing has always been my refuge from the complex, and sometimes frightening, world around me. I think she would approve of my yearning for concealment and secrecy. Although Anaïs offered to the world, some of her most intimate and innermost thoughts, she also was a woman of masquerades, and mysteries. In 1937, Anaïs wrote, “Writing as a woman. I am becoming more and more aware of this…My self—woman—womb—with grilled windows, veiled eyes, torturous, secret cells.”
Similar to Anais, I have been characterized throughout my life as elusive and reserved. I was a girl drawn to the quiet, and to the world of dream and solitary reflection. It is of no surprise that I have found such a strong companion in her. I was immediately drawn to her celebration of the inner life, and the enigmatic. She was a woman who saw the value in reverie, reflection, and imagination. While reading her diaries, I felt relief—she did not make me feel as though I had to change, become more extraverted, become more transparent, she let me be. To be in my own mind, to cultivate my own secrets, and to write my own words. Although I often felt delicate, I sometimes felt a sense of fearlessness when I wrote. Decades later, I found myself working as a clinical psychologist, tending to the inner lives of my patients, and holding their secrets. I wanted to pass on this gift that Anaïs had given me—to allow my patients the right to reclaim their own lives, to decide how much to share with the world around them, and to live in alignment with their own desires. In other words, the right to create.
Soon after purchasing Delta of Venus (I don’t think I even got halfway into the erotic tale) I encountered Anaïs’ diaries. I began voraciously collecting the various diary editions, pouring through their intoxicating pages. I felt at once, both identified with her words, and alienated by them. It is possible that my own sexual awakening, began by reading these very works. To read of Anaïs’ insatiable desire and hunger for the different lovers she longed after was enticing. I have yet to read such complete and ravenous accounts of the erotic. At the time, I knew I was reading something that would be confiscated from me. I did not want to be discovered. When I read her words, I read them in secret—they were just for me. I longed to live with the same intense mystery and passion as she once did, but it all felt so far away from me. I knew that I had to trust in the divine timing of my life. I was just a teenage girl reading her diaries in my small quiet bedroom.
Anaïs also provided me with an unforeseen source of assurance and understanding. As an introverted only child who grew up in a bi-cultural household, who longed for her other home across the ocean, and who found herself in a country where her surname was constantly botched, I found solace in Anais’ multicultural heritage. Anaïs regularly struggled with the concept of home and cultural identity. She often found herself living in some sort of diaspora. She was somehow of many places, and of no place. As a girl, in 1914, the melancholic Anaïs, writing with a sense of saudade, stated as she arrived in New York:
“I envy those who never leave their native land. I wanted to cry my eyes out…I cast a last glace around me at this last bit of Spain, which seemed to have wanted to accompany me this far, to remind me of my promise that I would return. Inside myself I answered, Oh, yes, I shall return to Spain.”
I resonated with her experiences of separation and estrangement, I too felt like my other life was somewhere in Spain, being experienced somehow without me. I no longer felt alienated in this ongoing and chronic sense of alienation and sorrow.
Later, this assurance extended beyond the complicated nature of cultural identity. In my doctoral program, I often felt othered in the world of academia for my feminine presentation, and for my draw toward the poetic and esoteric. Honestly, I preferred reading Simone Weil to Husserl, and secretly visited mediums and posed as an art model in the local art college’s basement. It was at this time that I found myself drawn back to Anaïs’ diaries, I needed them, I needed her, in a much different way. She bolstered me and gave me permission. Most importantly, by this time I had different ways of understanding and resonating with Nin’s confessional writing. I too had discovered, in my own way, the tumultuous realm of romantic love and heartbreak. She soothed my broken heart more than once and gave me the bravery to write and indulge myself in what most called for me.
During these lonely times, I also yearned to share something of Nin’s life in a more direct, experiential way. While her internal life was always there for me, commemorated in her diary pages, I began developing a fervent desire to touch the items she once had, and to immerse myself as fully as possible in her sensorial world. During these moments, I studied her diaries obsessively for the items that adorned her body, the perfumes that enveloped her, and the books that influenced her psychology. If I graced the objects she graced, I too would feel the courage to create, and pursue my inner most desires. Perhaps I would feel less alone. I experimented with her perfumes, preferring the heavily dark Narcisse Noir by Caron over the mossy melancholic Mitsouko by Guerlain. In her diary from 1931-32, she states: “Eduardo is drugged. With my words, my perfume (Narcisse Noir).” At this time, I was especially inspired by her drive to create and adorn the spaces in which she lived. In 1938, Nin wrote:
“A wish for me is not a game: It’s a creation. If I lie on my bed and dream of the pointed seashell necklace, I could sew on my black dress…I get up and sew the seashells. I come out with luminous nacre flowers on the top of a little black velvet skullcap…The flowers are strange, not understandable, significant, natural, a part of me.”
This unyielding desire stayed with me, and I entered a period of intense creativity and aesthetic indulgence.
And yet, I think where Anaïs’ spirit has shown up most profoundly, has been in my choice to become a psychotherapist. It was Anaïs, not Sigmund Freud, who first taught me the importance of cultivating my inner life and working with my dreams and fantasies. It was Anaïs, not my professors, nor my courses at the various psychoanalytic institutes I visited, who introduced me to Otto Rank’s work—the latter whose work bolstered my interest in “the artist” and in the curative potential of the creative process. Similarly, it was Anaïs, and not Jacques Lacan, who initially encouraged me to pay close attention to ellipsis, syllepsis, and repetition. She was my muse, supervisor, and teacher.
Anaïs is not often known as the lay analyst, or as the analysand, she once was. We most often think of her as diarist, or as an erotic novelist. In New York City, Anaïs had her own analysands. She assisted them in speaking as fully as possible their own inner worlds and hidden dreams. She held space for those suffering and desiring to know themselves more completely. She also knew what a difficult ordeal it was to be the one on the couch. The one labouring to speak. Anaïs had an ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis, she sometimes found it tormenting, and found herself wanting to cling on to her “disguises” it threatened to take away from her. She also at feared it would somehow cause a stuck-ness or paralysis. During a particularly painful moment of her analysis, Nin wrote in defiance, “No Dr. Allendy for me. No paralyzing analysis. Just living.” She expressed her worries in her diary, asking “What will become of the creator if I become normal?” However, Nin also described the ways that an analysis may deepen one’s understanding of oneself, to admit painful truths, and to utter the unspoken. According to Nin’s diary from 1931-21, Nin wrote, “Psychoanalysis may force me to be more truthful. Already I realize certain feelings I have, like the fear of being hurt.” While these psychoanalysis with Rank and Allendy did not offer her a panacea, they did provide her with a deepening into her psyche, and into her identity as woman as artist.
Nin’s imaginative spirit continues to inform how I confront suffering in the clinical space. Similar to Nin, I truly believe that art and creativity have the ability to heal, despite this life’s relentless obstacles. In the collection, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, Anaïs asserted “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art—we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.” I also trust that there are creative paths through, and out of suffering. In many ways the psychoanalytic path, like the artist’ journey, embodies this very ethos.
As I conclude, Anaïs’ legacy is exceptionally important during this collective experience of the ongoing Covid19 pandemic. During this time of collective grief and anguish, Anaïs offers us the consolations of beauty and art. She understood deeply how important it is to create a space from which to live—a space that gathers magic and muse. Anytime a patient of mine expresses through tears her desire to empty and alter her space after a heartbreak or a death, I am thrown back to Nin’s encouragement and insistence to cultivate a space of beauty. Even when her world was dull and frightening. Even when her world was drowning in war and violence.
While Anaïs celebrated beauty and eros, she was also in touch with the darker aspects of the human experience. She carries with her the aura of the Persephonic, of a woman who knows the underworld well. She had been to Hades and back countless times. Her embrace of the dark, and of the unspoken is something many of us may secretly (or not so secretly) yearn for during this era of toxic positivity and regimented self-care routines. To read her words, and immerse oneself in her diaries, is to also welcome in states of idleness and reverie—states so often pushed away by our culture hyper focused on productivity.
In closing, I also feel a strong need to protect her, to let her know that she does not need to ask us for forgiveness. Anaïs has been attacked throughout history and charged with being many things the years, things I do not wish to articulate or document here. I recall reading a well-known biography of hers, hoping to learn more about the artist who has meant so much to me, but unfortunately coming away with feelings of bitterness, anger, and sadness. As I reflect on such accounts, I would want Anaïs to know, that she has helped many women, including me, to live their lives fully, and to honor the importance of beauty, art, sensuality, and, at times, secrecy. I would want her to know that somewhere in Boston, there is a psychologist listening with curiosity and acceptance to her female patient’s most precious longings. I would want her to know that it was her, her words, her confessions, her life, which taught this psychologist how to be interested in her patient’s inner lives, and most importantly how to hold space for the unknown, and for the unsayable. It has been a quiet obsession, an ongoing friendship, and a strange identification with the ghost of Anaïs. It has also been a call to wander through this complicated life, with all its riches and troubles.
All photographs belong to Rebecca Marcelina Gimeno
Author’s note: In this essay, I reference a number of Anaïs Nin’s diaries and texts, including:
Nin, A. (1976). In favor of the sensitive man, and other essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Nin, A. (1977). Delta of Venus: Erotica. New York, N.Y: Tess Press.
Nin, A. (1989). Henry and June: From a journal of love. The Unexpurgated Diary (1931-1932). San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co.
Nin, A. (2003). Nearer the moon: From A journal of love, the unexpurgated diary of Anaı̈is Nin, 1937-1939. London: Peter Owen.
Nin, A., & NinCulrnell, J. (2014). Linotte: The Early Diary of Anais Nin (1914-1920). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Dr. Rebecca Marcelina Gimeno is a clinical psychologist in Boston, Massachusetts. Her clinical interests include psychoanalysis, phenomenological psychology, death & dying, and art therapy. In addition, Dr. Gimeno is also training as a death doula, focusing on pregnancy loss. In her free time she enjoys art making, beachcombing, reading, and spending time with loved ones.