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enjoy this Rochelle Lynn Holt writing
in the 2010 RE-release of her book

Anais Nin:
an Understanding of her Art
Anais Nin 2010 book release     Enjoy this perfect-bound
paperback book!

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TWO DOORS
THROUGH THE
HOUSE OF MIRRORS:
The Real
and the Symbolic



Rochelle Holt



��“I have an immense hunger for life.”
��This is “the madness of the poet,” that key for entry into the art and artifice of the artist Anais Nin who reveals in Diary 1, that her passion was compassion. “For me, understanding is love.” Her hero was the soul, in both her journal, an engraving of pain and her poetic prose, timeless fiction, like psychological fairy-tales to mask presentably secrets she could only bare or share in necessary mystery, while identifying them wrongly as “lies instead of myths.” According to her second psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, “this was the art of creating a beautiful disguise.”
��“From Catholicism to Lawrentianism,” the woman in the child and the child in the woman sought to seduce an unholy ghost, her “double. My evil Double,” the father she named as her male half who abused her bodily, possibly engendering her “Diana complex,” which belongs to the “woman who envies man his sexual power.” The child, conflicted about the pain and pleasure of punishment, thus unconsciously (or consciously and secretly) in her diaries yearned to be similarly powerfully free. “All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.”
��Her diary was a drug “covering all things with a mist of smoke, deforming and transforming as the night does.” Her “love of exact truth” was possibly characteristic of a self-identified jealous neurotic, although in direct opposition with her “lies in life,” the eye of the lie that opens and closes to reality not as one “I” but with double vision in “the nightmare of herself as two women,” the “multiple selves” she had labeled “a disease” in Henry Miller’s second wife June, one reflection of woman Anais yearned to become while already on her forked path to becoming.
��Coupled with emotional, compassionate, almost mirrored-identification, was Anais’ desire to be ubiquitous, in so many places, almost a thousand women, with her “infernal vision of freedom” while “wanting to be alone,” and “ask(ing) too much of life ... be(ing) cruelly disappointed.” At the same time, she realized “the only difference between the insane man and the neurotic is that the neurotic man knows he is ill.” Anais thus struggled with many secret selves, her early desire for bisexuality, no more sanctioned as healthy or normal in her era as the real preference is now. However, her emotional, psychological and sexual problems led her to psychoanalysis beyond books.
��“Anxiety devours me,” she wrote in the unexpurgated Incest: From a Journal of Love where she noted that her “season in hell” was the prose poem House of Incest. All the while, her undiagnosed bipolarity continued to stamp “emotionalism and sensibility,” her art, her very existence.
��“I want to go to Rank to get absolution for my passion for my father,” she wrote, or possibly as well, unfulfilled wishes that made her restless and neurotic, her “fears of sickness and madness.” Before, during and after analysis, the woman and the artist suffered to comprehend her “savage” side, the dark shadow, really the other woman in Anais who can be seen as typifying a rapid-cycler manic-depressive. Anais could only equate such shifting swift moods into a traditional societal term. “For no one has loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.”
��Any artist longs to be free, but the Linotte, aware of inheriting more than her father’s faults, had no idea she may have been genetically predisposed for a disorder now known as bipolarity. She reflected optimistically, even in her thirties, “I don’t believe I was born melancholic.” Not that her burgeoning disorder at times led Anais into actions (behavior), feelings (emotions), thoughts (ideas) even sexual experiences. However, for the child and woman, these “dark moments” when she was not “good and useful” may have been the spreading branches of a barely perceived mood disorder, rooted already in her artistic desires.
��Otto Rank, her second psychotherapist, explained her angst as “a manifestation of imagination,” in contradiction to what Anais had been religiously taught not to adapt to wholly as a dutiful daughter. “Rank teaches transmutation and mobility,” the best advice available at the time for one who confirmed herself often in the Early Diaries (Vol. 1-4) as being “in the grip of an attack of melancholy, and as usual for no apparent reason.
�� “A tragedienne and a poet,” Anais as Linotte saw life as spiritual sacrifice, the body “a veil each of us must wear before passing on elsewhere;” to counteract the sadness of reality, she proclaimed she was “in love with Beauty,” finding both solace and exacerbation of sorrow in music, represented by her musician father, of whom she had mixed feelings, just as she did for the Catholic God who failed to answer her prayers to reunite her in childhood with her paternal ideal. When she does meet her father, the second time in twenty years, Anais has “discovered (or believes) she does not need him.”
��She already had found a path to survival in a truly innovative way through the “journal as a product of (her) disease” while including real portraits, “first impressions,” as well “observance of other people’s outsides” and using same as substance for her symbolic stories, even if she was “taken in, in good faith by my own inventions,” noted in Henry&June.*







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