Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Nin, Anaïs (1903-1977)

Anaïs Nin, a diarist, writer, and lay analyst, was born on February 21, 1903, in Neuilly, near Paris. She died on January 16, 1977 in Los Angeles.

She was the daughter of Joaquin J. Nin y Castellanos (1879-1949), Cuban-born Spanish pianist and composer, and Rosa Culmell (1871-1954), Danish-French soprano. Nin lived in France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain until 1914, when her mother took her and two younger brothers to America. Her father, a compulsive Don Juan, had deserted his family for a young student. In New York Nin soon quit school, educated herself, and worked as a model for artists and clothing manufacturers.

In 1923 she married Boston-born Hugh Parker Guiler (1898-1985), a Columbia University graduate. From 1924 until 1939 the Guilers lived in Paris, where "Hugo" became an officer of an America bank, and Nin pursued her writing. They returned to New York in 1940, due to the war, and Nin, in 1948, began a "trapeze" life between her husband in New York and a lover in California, which she secretively pursued for almost thirty years. She died of cancer in Los Angeles in January 1977.

Lastingly traumatized by the enforced separation from her beloved father, on her journey into lifelong "exile," the eleven-year-old Catholic girl began a deeply confessional diary, from which edited selections first appeared in 1966. A record of an unending effort to realize and reconcile multiple potentials of an essentially fluid self, to find absolution in art, and to express an unrestrained female sexuality—see, for instance, the erotic stories in Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979)—Nin's Diary stands as a unique, massive, psychological document of a woman's life in the 20th century.

Nin read and defended D. H. Lawrence in her first book, An Unprofessional Study (1932), and had an incestuous reunion with her father in 1933. Confused by her eruptive sexual awakening, and after discovering psychoanalysis, Nin initially became a patient of René Allendy, who failed to understand her creative needs. Her next treatment was with Otto Rank, who fell in love with her. In 1934 she followed Rank to New York. She briefly served as his assistant and conducted result-oriented therapy sessions with a number of patients in 1935 and 1936, but eventually returned to Paris and her writing. See, for instance, the story "The Voice" in Winter of Artifice (1939).

GUNTHER STUHLMANN

See also: Allendy, René Félix Eugène; Rank (Rosenfeld), Otto.