Anaïs Nin on a Tea Bag Tag
A little diversion about taking charge of your world in the face of authority
In my papers today I found this tea bag tag. It’s a cross between reading tea leaves and breaking open a fortune cookie.
Anais Nin has a space to herself on my bookshelf. I wondered what more she wrote about courage, so I opened A Woman Speaks.
You might know that Nin was obsessed with writing the diary she began at age eleven. During her lifetime she published most of the nine volumes on my shelf.
Her literary reputation was built on the diaries. However, early in life she felt destined to be a professional writer of fiction. And when unconscious fears stopped her from writing novels, she became frustrated.
In Volume One of her published diary she tells how she went to the “legendary character”, Dr. Otto Rank, for help. He thought he knew how to cure her creative block. He said,
Anaïs, your diary is your last defense against analysis.
And he took it away from her!
In A Woman Speaks, Nin writes,
[He thought this would] push me out of the diary into writing fiction, into being more creative.
But without her diary, Nin was “very restless and unhappy”. So — she threatened Rank that if he didn’t return it, she would write about him!
The great doctor yielded and she got her diary back.
This is the story of how Anaïs Nin stood up in the 1930’s to a world-famous male psychoanalyst and, it seems, expanded her writing skills by herself. (See my tea bag tag above.)
To me, Nin seems fearless, so I’m not exactly sure this took courage on her part. But it was definitely an act of creativity!
Her childhood abuse left her with a desperation for love and attention. Perhaps this is why she became the noted writer who was of such interest to many of her peers.