November, 1945: Facing Fear

Anais is invited to speak in public, giving a short lecture, and reading a passage from This Hunger. It is her fear, speaking in public. She wears her favorite outfit. She stands, rather than sits, to give her performance.

In her Diary,  she analyzes the ordeal and the mastery of shyness. "As children, we are made to feel we will only be loved if we are good (in the parent's terms). As soon as we begin to affirm our real selves, parents begin to reject us. We grow up with the idea that if we are ourselves we will be rejected. So, as artists, in our work we express our real self. But we keep the fear of not being loved for this real self. And timidity and shyness are the symptoms. A timidity we can overcome with those who understand and accept us. Now when I have to face the world with my real self exposed in the writing, there is a crisis. Am I going to be accepted, approved, loved, or punished and rejected? Hence the fear. Last night I took this chance and won," she says.

October, 1945: World of the Artist

Anais Nin describes the world of the artist as being one of joy, creation, freedom, and altruism. She contrasts this with the world of reality, one of greed, power, war, self-interest, corruption, dullness, and hypocrisy.

She encounters people who come from both worlds; she seeks the world of the artist and avoids the world of reality. Artists haven't forgotten how to dream and maintain the innocence of the child. They understand the abstraction in her writing because they are poets. They seek harmony, as she does, and have no need to argue to prove they are right. Artists are romantic, intuitive, spontaneous people who create beauty.

September, 1945: Joyless People

How and when does one become a heavy, joyless, one-dimensional, cynical, bitter person?

Anais complains about people, men in her day, who are focused only on politics, work, money, greed, and power. She spends time with adolescent men and realizes that some day, they will become like their fathers. Now they are carefree, living in the world of music and art, pleasure and adventure-seeking, but soon, the reality of the real world will catch up to them and weigh them down.

She is attracted to the youth's positive attitudes towards life, their hope and optimism and dreams. Anais is 42 years old now and has not lost sight of her dreams whereas others her age dismissed them years ago. I think that is the difference between joyful people and joyless people: whether or not they still have dreams.

August, 1945: Examine the Present

"Rank did not believe in going back. He felt the same drama would manifest itself in the present; all one needed to do was examine the present. So in the present I was experiencing a conflict between the openness of the young, their curiosity, exploration, receptivity, playfulness, nimbleness, as against the heavy, opaque, solid, immovable mass of maturity I meet at parties," Anais declares.

Japan surrenders, and Anais relates war in the world to hostility in the individual. "We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing agression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there." she says.

July, 1945: Intuition or Analysis?

Which should we live by, rely on, intuition or analysis? Anais Nin says, "But I see clearly now, that both are necessary: to live passionately and blindly, to take risks; and then to interpret later, in order to rescue one's self from disaster if it turns out to be an illusion rather than a creative intuition."

She goes further to say, "There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis, the dismemberment, separation of the elements of the psyche which may release new energies. I believe scientific principles can be applied to the life of the psyche."

June, 1945: Spiritual Quest

"What I leave out of my work I leave out, discard, and overlook in life as well, because I do not think it is important. It weighs people down, and kills vision and spiritual perceptions. Too much upholstery. We are limited enough as it is without weighing ourselves down with facts which do not inspire, nourish, or liberate us," Anais says. "Everything else to me are obstacles, interferences, clutterings, inessentials," she continues.

Her friends says Anais is driven by a spiritual quest. She is aroused by life, always looking for meaning, and leaving out the superfluous. She constantly tries to make sense of her experiences by asking herself, what does this mean?

May, 1945: "The Double"

Anais Nin recalls a discussion she had with Dr. Otto Rank about what he termed "the double:" our need to project a part of ourselves onto others. Another doctor spoke about the same concept and how we play a persona to the world. Anais took notes:

"The acceptance of this social role delivers us to the demands of the collective, and makes us a stranger to our own reality. The consequent split in the personality may find the ego in agreement with general community expectations, while the repressed shadow turns dissenter. Failure to acknowledge this dark alter ego creates the tendency to project it onto someone in the immediate environment, the mirror-opposite to one's self. This redeems the masked self from total annihilation."

The doctor went on about the need to accept the shadow in human relationships. It is a wonderful thing when someone sees everything about you, your light parts and your dark parts, and accepts it all. It is an even more wonderful thing to accept the dark side of ourselves. Acknowledgement and acceptance of the shadow results in being conscious of the whole personality.