AT métro STOP NO. 3, the Trocadero, one emerges into what is, by common accord, the prettiest spot in Paris. The hill of Chaillot—the historic name of the place—is not the highest in Paris, but this view over the Seine, just where the river swings south-westwards, is unequalled by any other. The Eiffel Tower is before us, the Champ de Mars is at our feet, the École Militaire lies beyond. In this delightful setting we shall consider a story of love, war—and psychoanalysis. It is a strange Parisian fact: in this city there are more practising Freudian psychoanalysts today than in any other city in the world, save Buenos Aires, Argentina.
What a beautiful view from a beautiful hill. The problem for centuries was that nobody knew what to do with it. There had been a convent here in the seventeenth century but neglect had allowed it to fall into ruin. The same fate awaited the makeshift military barracks erected here during the Restoration. Napoleon III set up a terrace at the summit from where he could admire what progress his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, was making in demolishing and remodelling the city His uncle had planned in 1810 a vast palace for his son, the King of Rome. It would have been larger than Versailles and would have flattened most of the hill, a truly imperial project. Unfortunately, the forces of Europe were allied against him and he managed to do no more than pull down the shacks, dig a few holes and build some sections of the planned outer walls, which his successor promptly dismantled.
During the decades that followed a few intrepid hunters would clamber up the hill to kill a rabbit. In 1823 there was a mock battle and a firework display at the top to celebrate the Due d'Angouleme's capture of the Spanish fort of Trocadero, a campaign that was already forgotten by the end of the year; only the quaint Spanish name stuck. The poet and writer Paul de Kock has described Sunday picnics he used to have here with his family; they would sit in the grass and eat pâté de veau froid. In the Musée Carnavalet hangs a delightful watercolour by Sigismond Himely which shows a stone quarry on the edge of a field of rye; a visitor sits contemplating a peasant girl on the back of an ass with baskets filled with vegetables. And we are only a couple of miles from the centre of Paris!
What eventually decided the fate of the Trocadero was the westward movement of buildings and people, a movement that would cut through the ancient north-south axis of Heaven and Hell and impose the new east—west axis of the Louvre, the Concorde, the Champs-Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe and La Defense—the Paris you and I know, the Trocadero you and I see.
One of the persons to enjoy the modern Trocadero was Adolf Hitler. "It was the dream of my life to be able to visit Paris," he said on a sunny 28 June 1940. "I cannot say how happy I am that this dream was realized today." A lightning campaign and the death of 150,000 men had made the trip possible. The Trocadero, the outing lovingly recorded on celluloid, was one of the highlights of the Ftihrer's visit.
In the 1930s Nazi Germany developed an absolute fascination for Paris. Paris—that is, the visual image of Paris—corresponded so well to the Nazi ideal of spectacle and power, the "triumph of the will" to borrow the title of Leni Riefenstahl's famous film of the Nuremberg Rally. Look at that terrace of the Trocadero: it puts you in mind of Riefenstahl's Nuremberg, no? One does not have to possess enormous aesthetic sense to notice that the architecture and paintings of Italian Futurists, French Surrealists, German Nazis and Russian Socialist Realists all had something in common. Call it modernism, if you will. A single theme runs through them all, that of a Prometheus unchained, man breaking out of the walls that had imprisoned him, man born again: the triumph of the will, the creative burst. This virile message put Christian art on the defensive.
Paris responded in style to the new pagan times. Unable to be capital of the industrial world, she strove to be capital of the artistic world. She was more than successful. Crowds had flocked to her World Expositions, all of them held at the foot of the Trocadero. The Trocadero was designed for these big shows. Thirty-two million people visited the 1889 Exposition, carrying home the little models of the new Eiffel Tower; fifty-one million came to Expo' 1900 — that is more than seventeen times the entire population of Paris, a figure that has only once been exceeded in the history of the world since (at Osaka, Japan, in 1970). As a result, many artists and literary figures decided to make a second home in Paris. Especially important among these aesthetic migrants were the British and, later, the Americans.
There was also the German component. How Berlin enjoyed watching Josephine Baker dance nude on their stages, singing "Mon pays, c'est Paris." German cabarets in the 1930s were filled with French song; Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier had their imitators in Berlin. Huge choral groups and girly reviews made a nice complement, a mirror image, to the troops out on the streets in Berlin; but they were also an idealization of the Paris that Ludendorff's armies had not reached in 1918. At the end of the 1930s Goebbels's film industry produced Bel Ami, which showed Paris to be a welcoming place, a living spectacle of perpetual gaiety; in one scene, the song "The Harmonica Invites Us To Dance" is performed right in front of the Hôtel Meurice—just where General von Choltitz set up his headquarters in August 1944. Looking at the Trocadero you can see how, with its terrace and the museums and theatres on either side, and the Champ de Mars beyond, it has been built for the big parade, the spectacular dance.
That was the culture Hitler represented. He arrived to an empty Paris in the early hours of 28 June 1940. He insisted on having two artists accompany him, his architect, Albert Speer, and his principal sculptor, Arno Breker. The accounts left by these two men closely corroborate each other. The filming of the event—high sweeping cameras which, every now and then, zoom into the Fiihrer's black Mercedes with the two artists sitting behind him—come up to the highest Nazi standards. Every detail that demonstrates the triumphant will of the Fiihrer, the beauty of the occasion, is brought to the fore. At one point the car passes a group of confused gendarmes (they are described by both Breker and Speer) who can think of nothing better to do than salute the Fiihrer. The cameramen obviously like roundabouts; they give them a chance to show off their equipment. This is done with great éclat as Hitler is driven up to the terrace of the Trocadero (though the car is actually driven the wrong way round the roundabout). On his approach a lone French worker, symbolic of the defeat, is observed in the corner of the frame.
SO THERE IS Hitler, there the palace, there the commanding hill. But the story that needs to be told on this pagan terrace, its stones devoted to the triumph of the will, is of a more human dimension; it is a story of love and passion that developed under the shadow of Hitler's dictatorship. Those stones on Trocadero Hill contain the memories of a man and a woman who lived not far from here.
Dr. Otto Rank was one of the great heretics of the psychoanalytic movement. His writings about human will and the artistic act had got him into trouble with his master, Sigmund Freud, in Vienna. Rank claimed that the cause of human anxiety lay not in sex (the libido) but in the experience of birth. Replacing Freud's explanatory metaphor of the Oedipal myth with the metaphor of the expulsion from Paradise, he overthrew the patriarchal schema of the Freudians — the murder of the father and incest with the mother—with an idea that reinstated the mother-child bond as the model of all relations. "Im gegenteil! Die Mutter! On ze contrary, ze mozer!" Rank exclaimed to the American Psychoanalytical Association in Atlantic City when outlining his new book, The Trauma of Birth. This was in early June 1924 during his first trip overseas since the First World War. He was received as an emissary of Freud. "He was the very image of the scholarly German student," said Jessie Taft, who would become a much needed friend in the years to come.
At the time Rank also thought of himself as an emissary of Freud. But within months the discord was set in motion. Rank never really understood what had happened to him; he was Sigmund Freud's adopted son; since 1905 he had recorded the minutes of the weekly meetings in the Professor's house and taken long midnight strolls through Vienna's empty streets with him afterwards; he had been an instigator of the secret Committee which reviewed membership of the International Psychoanalytic Association and expelled recalcitrants; he was one of Freud's intimates, indeed his most intimate. In 1925 the tables were turned: it was "little Rank" who was under attack.
He was baffled. But the sniping went on for years. He was not a theoretician, he said. "I haven't anything to 'teach' and can't have any kind of a 'school'—not even an undogmatic one," he protested to Jessie Taft. The Americans, he said, were trying to create a "struggle to match my theory against the Freudian when I haven't got one." Rank's two central ideas, that a child's first anxiety was a consequence of birth and that therapy should be set a definite time limit, could certainly be traced back to Freud. The problem was one of emphasis. Those who minimized the role of the libido—Fliess, Jung, Adler and Rank—would be purged. The way this was done—through the public "revelations" of a dissenter's "neurosis"—bore a certain comparison to Nazi and Communist tactics.
The point is not made lightly; there really was a parallel. The rise and fall of psychoanalysis followed the same curve as that of the other great ideological poisons of the twentieth century It reached its peak in the 1940s, then gradually fell off. Psychoanalysis, just like Communism, received a second wind in Paris with the student riots of 1968, only to collapse under its own weight in the decades that followed. One hundred years after its birth psychoanalysis has few strongholds left in the world; one is Paris.
The glory of Otto Rank is that he realized that something was fundamentally wrong with the movement as early as the 1920s, which is when he migrated to Paris. The therapist should be humble and not pretend that his knowledge was pure science; on the contrary, it was pure art. "I never try to cure," he once remarked. Instead he tried to confront the patient with his neurosis; help the patient realize that the source of his anxiety was the very source of his creativity. "Will therapy," as Rank called it, allowed the patient to realize his full potential as an integrated, creative being. Unlike Freudian analysis, which could go on forever, Rank limited therapy to six months; an "end-setting," claimed Rank, forced the patient to crystallize the inner will conflict. Like the artist who works within the borders of his canvas to enhance a portion of experience, like the poet who transcends his own complaint about the poverty of language, Rank sought, in the analytic hour, to seize the patient's love, anger, pain or joy and demonstrate that these were the very forces that made him creative. To Freud's claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living," Rank replied, "the uncreative life is not worth living." Rank was the "midwife," as he described himself, attending upon a "rebirth."
By 1926 it was no longer possible for Rank to continue practice in Vienna. There was a last painful scene at 19 Berggasse, where Rank had first met the Professor twenty-one years before. "So quits!" wrote Freud to his colleague in Budapest, Sandor Ferenczi (who was himself constantly subjected to Freud's personal slights). "On his final visit I saw no occasion for expressing my special tenderness; I was honest and hard. But he is gone now and we have to bury him."
Rank arrived in Paris that April. Psychoanalysis in Paris had already found a patron in the immensely wealthy Princess Marie Bonaparte, a direct descendant, as everybody knew, of Napoleon I's brother Lucien and a descendant also, through her Jewish mother, of the founder of Monte Carlo's gambling casino—as few people knew. "I went to Vienna in 1925 to undergo analysis by Professor Freud," as she put it. "I thus had the occasion to make the acquaintance of his family." Most practitioners in Paris before the Second World War were foreigners and their patients were also drawn largely from the artistic immigrant community. A therapist of special note was the Polish-born Eugenie Sokolnicka who, in the 1930s, became André Gide's analyst before she committed suicide. But it was Rank, working through the American community, who gave the movement a serious note. After several changes in residence, in the summer of 1927 he eventually acquired his magnificent corner apartment at 9, Rue Louis-Boilly, just opposite the impressionist Musee Marmottan and less than a quarter of a mile from the Trocadero. How appropriate: Rank was the painter of souls and an impresario of human personality. American writers and artists flocked to his handsomely furnished consulting room. He charged them five dollars an hour, three times the going rate in New York.
"I DON'T REMEMBER how I found out that Dr. Otto Rank was living in Paris, on the boulevard Suchet," wrote the American novelist Anaïs Nin in her journal on 7 November 1933. Slim, languid Anaïs Nin with her startling oriental eyes was nervous. "I impulsively decided to ring Rank's doorbell," she continues. "By sheer accident, it was he who opened the door. 'Yes?' he said in his harsh Viennese accent, wrapping the incisive, clean French word in a German crunch. He was small, ark skinned, round faced; but actually one saw nothing but the eyes, which were beautiful. Large, dark, fiery. With my obsession for choosing the traits which are beautiful or lovable, and wearing blinkers to cover what I do not admire or love, I singled out Rank's eyes to eclipse his homely teeth, his short body"
It was one of the encounters of the century, initiated within a few months of Hitler's rule in Germany, though few would know what actually transpired until the unexpurgated diaries of Anaïs Nin were published in the 1990s.
Anais Nin and Otto Rank made an improbable couple. Otto Rank was born "with hair complete," in April 1884, into Vienna's poor Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt on the east side of the Donau Canal. He and his elder brother, Paul, both hated their father, Simon Rosenfeld, an artisan jeweller who was frequently drunk. Paul was put through law school while Otto worked in a machine shop until he met Freud in 1905. Rank's ideas about willpower and artistic creation were born out of his own isolated adolescence, spent at night reading Schopenhauer, Ibsen and Nietzsche—works that "brought him to the brinks of ecstasy and despair." Music, which Freud hated so much that he could not even support the presence of musicians in a café, was defined by Rank in his adolescent diary as "not the image of an idea but the image of will itself." He adopted his name from the "Dr. Rank" in Ibsen's A Doll's House, the sympathetic old man who befriended Nora. In private circles Rank also adopted the name "Huck" from Mark Twain's Huckle- berry Finn; in contrast to Tom Sawyer, who pursued an elaborate, bookish strategy to free slaves, Huck was direct, emotional and practical with his pal Nigger Jim.
Briefly, there was nothing scientific about "Huck" Rank's upbringing. He was an artist to the core, and this showed in his first book, The Artist, completed before he was twenty-one. It so impressed Sigmund Freud that he was hired on the spot as his personal secretary; it was Freud who put him through the Gymnasium and University, ironically while Rank was already sending out directives to fellow psychoanalysts throughout the world.
Rank's poor health—he had suffered rheumatic fever as a child-had kept him away from Armageddon during his military service in the last years of the war. In 1917 he had been posted in Cracow, then in Austrian Galicia, where he met his beautiful and talented Jewish bride, Beata Tola. In 1919 she gave birth to their daughter, Helene. Beata would herself become an accomplished psychoanalyst. But she was no socialite and gradually, in the 1920s, she withdrew from Rank's life. She lived with her husband behind the Trocadero at Rue Louis-Boilly But in the autumn of 1933 they were on the point of divorce.
Could "Huck" be the sympathetic old man to Anaïs Nin? It was not exactly the role she sought in him. They came from such totally different worlds, though there was in Nin that soul—"an angel pattern externally while internally diabolical"—urging her to live her creations. Anaïs Nin was born in Paris in 1903 with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her father was a Spanish composer and playboy, Joaquin Nin, her mother a Danish singer, Rose Culmell. Just before the outbreak of war the mother and Anais's brothers moved out to New York because Joaquin had deserted the family for another woman. But it was Joaquin whom Anaïs loved, incestuously so. In the 1920s she was back in Paris. Around the father developed over the next two decades a network of husbands, lovers and occasional man friends that would include most of the American artistic community as well as wide sections of Parisian high society.
One might say that her life between the wars reads like a great Parisian novel; but actually her life was the great Parisian novel, for many of the American authors who followed her culled their books from the story of Anaïs Nin. "Draw a chart!" she told her lover Henry Miller who was working on a new novel. "We always attain beautiful heights, wrestling with the immense load of ramifications." Yet it was all so complicated! Anaïs was in need of a psychoanalyst.
At the moment she rang Otto Rank's doorbell her network spread outwards from hot to cold like our bright solar system with its planets and circling moons. In the centre radiated the Father taking "joy out of his silly little cunt chasing"; Anaïs travelled between the planets but her life still depended on Father's warmth, a fact that she resented; she was determined "to make him suffer before he made me suffer."
Further afield revolved her husband, Hugh Guiler, a wealthy Bostonian who had married her in Havana, Cuba, when she was twenty; he worked for National City Bank in Paris and he provided his wife with homes: a sizeable house in Louveciennes, to the west of the city, and various apartments in Paris, according to the season. There was also his parents' home at Forest Hills, outside New York. Hugh commiserated with his Scottish friend, Donald Killgoer, about their spouses' infidelities; Anaïs knew that if she suddenly confessed everything, "Hugh would twist his hands, as Donald did, until the bones cracked, and rave as Donald did, and curse me, and try to kill me;" but Anaïs was not the confessing kind.
Further out still was one of the major planets, the Brooklyn refugee Henry Miller, a system all of its own. He was at this time "staying in a pimp-and-whore Hôtel in Montmartre" but he had just agreed "to move to whatever Hôtel I [Anais] chose." She found what she thought was a modern, attractive hotel—again behind the Trocadero—at 26, Rue des Maronniers; she only later found out that it was very well known for "temporary alhances and well-kept mistresses;" but at least it was comfortable. Anaïs spent much of her energy trying to get Henry's first novel, The Tropic of Cancer, published; her chief link here was Rebecca West who kept a posh place in London and cultivated relations with the grand London literary agent A. D. Peters. But nobody seemed to appreciate Henry's efforts; Rebecca told Anaïs that she wrote better, and that is what Anaïs thought, too. Caresse Cosby, who ran a press in Paris, was also a promising link—particularly inviting because of her large property out at Ermenonville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's old haunt about an hour's drive from Paris. Henry talked to himself as he tapped at his typewriter, "writing about dung, ulcers, chancres, disease. Why?" Henry was driving poor Anaïs to despair.
Other planets included a beloved cousin from Cuba, Eduardo Sanchez, an astrologer who spent a lot of time at the house in Louveciennes; Antonin Artaud, the actor and playwright who was another frequent guest at Louveciennes; Dr. René Allendy, who had made a faint-hearted attempt to psychoanalyse Anaïs in 1932; and a certain Mr. Turner, a businessman, in whom Anaïs seemed to have more than a passing interest. Louise de Vilmorin provided advice; Princess Natasha Troubetskoia lent her artist's studio for secret liaisons; Chana Orloff, the sculptor, provided similar services. Then into the whole system burst the asteroid, Dr. Otto Rank, the man of willpower, the artistic creator.
It was "impossible to analyse his way of analysing, because of its spontaneity, its unexpectedness, its daring, nimble opportunism." "There is a pre-Rank vision, and there is an after-Rank swimming." He had made her "swim in life," Nin wrote in her diary after two months of analysis. It was a mental adventure. After she had outlined her complicated system of relationships and alliances, Rank said, "I can't help you unless you break away from all of them, isolate yourself until you are calm." She slowed down her round of the planets, and she did get Henry to move from his down-and-out lodgings in Montmartre to Rue des Maronniers.
But what really changed her life was the discovery, in May 1934, that she was six weeks pregnant: "I know it is Henry's child, not Hugh's, and I must destroy it." She could not awake herself as an artist unless she did away with this child, because Henry was the child. Her pregnancy was a mark of failure: "When Henry and I have failed to bring forth works of art, we create a child." Having his child would at once destroy her love for Henry and break the tie with Hugh. But Rank's analysis on this point was telling. "When the neurotic woman gets cured, she becomes a woman," he said. "When the neurotic man gets cured, he becomes an artist. Let us see whether the woman or the artist will win out. For the moment you need to become a woman." There was the dilemma.
Her reaction was to create yet further complication. "On Tuesday I decided to become an analyst, to become independent." It was six months since her analysis had begun; Rank was "end-setting," forcing his patient to confront her inner will. She put on her new hyacinth blue dress and on the last day in May she rushed to Rank. "I couldn't talk. I got up from my chair, and I knelt before him and offered my mouth. He held me tightly, tightly; we couldn't speak." On i June 1934—there had been riots in the streets that spring but Anaïs Nin never noticed; Rank himself was the object of vicious attacks from America—Rank "dragged me toward the divan and we kissed savagely, drunkenly... I had not imagined his sensual accord." His hand thrust out. "I like the hardness. I like the animal thrust forward."
On 6 June she woke up after dreaming all night of an orgy with Henry She went round to his bed and found him "depressed and desirous," and "I swallowed his sperm for the first time." Up she got, quickly powdered herself, and rushed off to Rank's. They kissed voraciously, she lay under him and kissed again; and "in our drunkenness I found myself drinking his sperm, too." With that tender operation completed, he threw himself once more over her, crying, "You! You! You!"
"Hugh tortures me, Henry uses me, Father is cruel; but I have the jewelled tower with Rank." 12 June 1934: "After this moment of darkness, I began to dream again. I was going to see Rank, to see Him; I was going to see Him, I wanted to see Him." Rank in fact got quite ill; on the day they planned a naughty weekend in Louveciennes he turned up at the agreed café pale in the face and speechless. Nin offered to come round to his Boilly apartment, and there she tucked him into bed. The naughty weekend occurred the following week, but was somewhat cooled by the prospect of Hugh turning up early in the morning. Rank needed a sexual education: "Too swift, he is too swift, and so unaware of the woman's response." The gardens outside were snowed with withered blossoms.
Henry was moved out to Mother's apartment, also in the Seizieme. Rank was having difficulties making financial ends meet; there was the possibility that he might have to do something drastic, like move to America—Jessie Taft had contacts. Rank was however making headway that summer with the English-language Psychological Centre he had set up with Dr. Harry Bone and his colleague, a Dr. Frankenstein, at the Cité Universitaire, just south of Hell's Square. Between orgiastic feasts with Anais, Rank managed to get a successful seminar running, attended by fifteen American female schoolteachers and three male writers. Anaïs came along but found the discussions to be "pragmatic, dull, like all American craft talk." Rank managed to stand above it all, making brilliant and dangerous talk about Freud. "There are two Ranks," Nin observed; "Rank the philosopher and psychologist, and Rank the human being." She knew what she needed, "the power of love. It is what I want. I want wine."
Rank's "end-setting" was getting rather intense. His finances still didn't look good. He knew that if he went to America to teach he would also be moving among his very worst enemies, the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Jessie Taft offered the prospect of the Pennsylvania School of Social Work in Philadelphia and a practice in New York; the APA had a hold on all the positions at Harvard, Yale, and the main universities in New York. "I'm falling in love with your books. Are you jealous?" asked Nin. "That depends how far they take you away from me," he replied. Or again: "I have finished my creation without you, I can love you as a woman"—just a woman.
All the while Nin was carrying this child, an unwanted child. Her taut breasts were full of milk, bitter milk; every morning she looked down at her rounded white stomach. Abortion was illegal—though that in itself was no problem; she could find the sages-femmes, the midwives, as well as a good German doctor, through the astrological people who revolved round her cousin Eduardo Sanchez. But the sages-femmes were having trouble with their instruments; Anaïs Nin's pelvis was too small for an effective operation; the German doctor told Nin that if she were to give birth it would require a Caesarean. Nin hesitated and delayed. In late August she was carrying a foetus of six months. Rank was away in London laying plans for what looked like an increasingly probable departure for the United States. Henry was at her mother's apartment, sulking in his jealousy.
On the evening of 29 August 1934 Anaïs Nin was in Rank's empty apartment, alone, awaiting the arrival the next morning of the terrifying German abortionist and his sages-femmes; alone for her last night with her child.
She told the child: "You should be glad not to be thrust into this black world in which even the greatest joys are tainted with pain, in which we are slaves to material forces." The child replied by kicking against her womb. The room was dark, just as dark as her child's little room. "So full of energy, oh, my child, my half-created child that I will thrust back into the neant again. Back into the paradise of nonbeing." All the child represented at this moment was a future, a future that Anaïs did not want. "You are the abdication," she whispered to her child. "I live in the present, with men who are closer to death. I want men, not a future extension of myself into a branch." The child again kicked and stirred in response.
"You ought to die before knowing light or pain or cold. You ought to die in warmth and darkness. You ought to die because you are fatherless." Anaïs sighed to her child, telling it of the solar system she had created. Not a true father was there. First there was the Sun, Joaquin Nin, "it was he who fathered me . . ." She wasn't going to go through all that a second time, "I should be an orphan again." Then there was the war: "I wept for all the wounds inflicted." Then a thousand injustices: "I struggled to return life, to re-create hope." Then there was Hugh. Well, he was taking care of her—all those apartments! "Now, if you came, you would take him for a father and this little ghost would never let me go"—what would be left of me? Then there was Henry: "This man is not a father; he is a child, he is the artist. . . There is no end to his needs . . . He is my child and he would hate you." There was then Rank. Rank could be a father. But how could Rank be both an artist and a father? It would be his death. "There is no father on earth. The father is this shadow of God the Father . . . This shadow you would worship and seek to touch, dreaming day and night of its warmth, the shadow of a magic father which is nowhere to be found: it would be better if you died inside me, quietly, in the warmth and in the darkness."
The fourteen pages Anaïs Nin devoted to her abortion, under the date 29 August 1934, are the most extraordinary of her entire multi-volume unexpurgated diary They are the most powerful, with a tension far more gripping than the thousand plus pages detailing her sexual exploits. To whom is she addressing this diary entry? Her dying child? Her sadistic German doctor? The violent, ugly sages-femmes, worthy of the Bureau General on Rue Sainte-Apolline. Her diary? God the Father? The style is religious, the mood one of ecstasy, like that of a seventeenth-century saint. One is not even sure where she is or who knows what, who knows whom. "Hugh drove us to the clinique." So Hugh was eventually told? There is no other reference in the diary to such a major event. Who is us} Was she really introduced to the German doctor as "Princess Aubergine"? The name seems a little ridiculous. And where is this clinique? There are many cliniques in the Seizieme, hidden behind the public spectacle of the Trocadero.
We cannot even picture where she first meets the German doctor. At Rank's apartment? At the clinique} "While he operates we talk about the persecution of the Jews in Berlin. I help him wash the instruments." Anaïs wears the ring Rank gave her, the ring that Freud gave Rank, the ring that symbolizes the alliance of the secret psychoanalytic Committee Rank helped set up in Vienna in 1911, the Committee that eventually purged him. In his most famous photograph one sees Rank at thirty-four—the last year of the war—seated authoritatively, well dressed, staring out of his horn-rimmed spectacles, while holding high the right hand which sports Freud's secret ring.
Anais is shaved and prepared for the major operation. She is resigned, yet terrified of the anaesthetic. Anxiety The high birth trauma begins.
The German doctor has the face of a woman, his eyes protruding with anger and fear. For two hours she makes violent efforts, the child inside her too big, the veins inside swelling with the strain. "Push! Push with all your strength!" yell the gaggle of women. One of them bangs down on her stomach. "Push! Push!" With all her strength? She has none left. She has nowhere to put her bent legs.
"Push! Push!" Her bones are cracking. A curtain is torn, bare light bulbs seem everywhere, heads, heads, heads hung with the lamps, a chorus of screaming voices, the words turning as on a badly wound phonograph disc; the doctor is in a frenzy, he wants to kill; the women all laugh—there is no more bandage! No more bloody bandage! They wash instruments. They talk. They talk. "Please hold my legs! Please hold my legs! Please hold my legs! PLEASE HOLD MY LEGS!" They start again. "Push! Push!" The bare lamp is shining white. "It sucks me into space." "Push! Push!" The ice in the veins, the cracking of bones, this pushing into blackness.
The German takes hold of some long, medieval type of instrument and thrusts it into her. Along animal howl: "That will make her push." He smiles to the sage-femme. "If you do that again I won't push. Don't you dare do that again! Don't you dare!" The doctor bends down to look. She's dying. The child's dying. The doctor is baffled, furious. He wants to take a knife. "Let me alone!" Is that its head? "I want to die in its grasp." The ice. The doctor takes up his long instrument again. "Don't you dare! Don't you dare! Leave me aione all of you!" The sage-femme places her fat knees on the stomach. "I push into this tunnel, I bite my lips, my eyes, blood, blood." "Push! It is coming! Push! It is coming!" "For God's sake, don't sit up, don't move!" "Show me the child!" The sages-femmes force her down. "Show it to me!" The doctor holds it up: a small, diminutive man, but it is a little girl, perfectly made, glistening with the water of Nin's womb. "A dead creation, my first dead creation."
Anaïs then experiences what must be described as a mystical vision. She had, as she puts it, abdicated one kind of motherhood for the sake of a higher one. Nature had shaped her body for passion alone, for the love of man. The child, such a primitive connection with the earth, had been cast off, thrown aside. She had killed the child, she had sustained the lover. "Man the father I do not trust. I do not want man as father. I stand by man the lover and creator." She sat on the operating table, looking at "that little Indian," the dead child. It was a penis, "swimming in my overabundant honey."
Then appeared the planets. Hugh came to her bedside; she wept. Henry and Eduardo; Henry and Hugh; poor old Henry had been suffering stomach pains all night. Henry and Eduardo again. They all passed by as if in a dream. Then in came Rank at eleven o'clock, just back from London; "We said very little." But it had been Rank who provided the vision, the trauma of birth, the "end-setting."
And end-setting it was. In four weeks Rank was gone. He would take the ship for Baltimore from Le Havre. "Dr. and Mrs. Rank" spent the night together in Rouen, then he left.
But the end-setting proved a drawn-out business, as bad as any in Freudian psychoanalysis. Nin did not let Rank disappear so easily; in December 1934 she followed him out to New York, where the old passion was revived. But, ironically, her departure for New York ultimately strengthened her tie with Henry who, madly jealous, turned up on a pier in New York in January.
Gradually her love for Rank turned into physical revulsion. Writers on the affair, leaning on the censored versions of the Nin diary, have said that for Nin it was always "Rank." This is not so. When Rank set himself up in America in late 1934 he became known to his friends as "Huck," thanks to Rank's rereading of Mark Twain, this time in English: he saw that "Huck" was the embodiment of the "roguish boy" that Freud had characterized him as being at the moment of their rupture in 1926; he was a fun-loving, spontaneous artist. Huck bought black panties and bras for Anaïs and, during their naughty nights in Atlantic City and at the Barbizon-Plaza in New York, they played Huck and Puck together, Huck sometimes dressing up as Puck and vice versa— the meaning of the psychoanalytic rhyme on the words being all too obvious; in Harlem they danced with the Negroes, which Huck was convinced every patient in analysis should do. But Anaïs yearned for Henry and not Huck, especially after Henry's arrival in New York.
The sex games with Huck frankly disgusted her. Henry of course was only too eager to help her along that route: "Oh, the ugliness, the vulgarity," said Henry. "A most unprepossessing guy" One of Nin's women friends wrote to her, "I saw an ugly Uttle man with bad teeth." On meeting him in Pennsylvania Station as he returned from his teaching post in Philadelphia, Nin noted in her diary: "I dreaded the moment when he would kiss me. I eluded it." She hated the bad breath, the perspiration.
Huck could not accept Anais's lies, the mensonge vital; he would not—unlike Father, Hugh and Henry—believe them. "Twice now a black pall came over Huck," Anaïs noted in May "His depressions are terrible and like an animal's. He lies there sighing, collapsed, with an earth-colored face, with a breath like death. Death all over his face." It only made Anaïs angry.
In June she boarded the boat for France; Henry followed that autumn. "No one will ever come so near to me, to my soul and being," Anaïs wrote in her farewell note to the greatest beast in her life. "I just wanted you to know." "Where will I meet Rank again?" she wondered, sitting by the petal-strewn lawn of Louveciennes. 'At the café du Rond Point, where we met on our way to the room? At Villa Seurat, while walking with Henry, or carrying Henry's market bag? Paris is like a second-rate fair."
The political situation was getting increasingly uncomfortable and Rank, in New York, made more and more references to it. "Times are difficult all over the world," he had written to Jessie Taft while still in France: "people in America have no money to come over and besides Europe seems to be threatened by war!" In a postscript he added: "Jung has gone overtly 'Nazi' and propagates now a 'Germanic' psychology against the 'Jewish.'" It was perfectly true, and is a fact deliberately overlooked by Jung scholars. Carl Jung took over the presidency of Berlin's New German Society for Psychotherapy and used it shamelessly to disseminate his own Aryan ideas. Yet in 1936 he received an honorary doctorate at the Harvard Tercentenary celebration and, a year later, he received another honorary doctorate at Oxford. Hitler marched into Vienna in 1938 and Freud, through the aid of the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, marched out. At the age of eighty-two he still had his sense of humour. Signing the paper required by the authorities certifying that he had been properly treated, he wrote: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone."
Psychoanalytic politics also got increasingly vicious. There were no honorary doctorates for Rank. He had shocked colleagues in Washing- ton for an International Congress on Mental Hygiene by announcing that there was no single psychological truth and that psychoanalysis could never be a science. In his book, Art and the Artist, which is probably his best, he took the idea further by claiming that the creative impulse had to be put directly at the service of individual personality, unique for each man. At the peak of life, he said, we confront the vale of death; one is most aware of finiteness at moments of great joy If art is the loan, he taught, death is the repayment. He repeated a childhood theme he had pinched from Schopenhauer: one must will ayes to the must—an idea not far from Blaise Pascal's "thinking reed" bending to the wind.
It was not a very satisfactory analysis for the scientific Freudians, who shrouded everything in the unprovable unconscious, refusing to recognize physical birth trauma in the formation of human personality (an exterior and thus measurable phenomenon). A. A. Brill had taken control of the New York Psychoanalytic Society from which he excluded all lay analysts, such as Rank. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society threw out the Rankians after 1929. The Americans may have been selective in their comments about Freud—hadn't he said after his one visit to the United States that 'America is a gigantic error?"—but by 1930 the main faculties of the East Coast were run by orthodox Freudians. For Rank the worst insult came when Erich Fromm, a young psychoanalyst of high standing in New York, published in the May 1939 issue of Psychiatry an article that argued that the philosophy of "will therapy" was fascistic, akin to the authoritarian ideologies of Mussolini and Hitler with its "concept of the necessity of submission and sacrifice." The vast majority of American psychoanalysts agreed with Fromm, whose books remained required reading in university curricula until the 1970s. The rumour went around that Rank was "sick, sick, sick."
And so it seemed. Neither Freud nor his adopted son would survive the new war more than a few weeks. Freud's death had been expected. After another gruelling experience of surgery which cut out most of his lower jaw, Freud took an overdose of morphine on 23 September 1939 and died in his new, pretty English home. Rank had been having trouble with his kidneys, liver, gall bladder and had had major dental surgery— "you may wonder what is left," he quipped to Jessie Taft, "the good old colon... had been troubling me years ago . . . I know I am sick." His eyes were giving up, but here he had been lucky to find a second pair in the person of Miss Estelle Buel, a Swiss American who had become his secretary—and in July 1939 his second wife. They had driven leisurely across the country and had decided on a new life in California. But that was not to be. Back in New York in mid-October he wrote once more to Jessie Taft: "I remember the old story of the man whose execution was set for Monday morning and who on his way to the gallows remarked, 'This week does not begin too well!'" On Friday, 28 October, while dining out with Estelle, he complained of a sore throat; the fever rose; he was admitted to hospital; his daughter Helene was there, as was Estelle. Death came at 8.30 that Monday morning, after he had breathed a last word in German: "Komisch" (comical? strange? peculiar?—Rank, fifty-five years old, carried the joke to his grave).
Anais, in Paris, cured her disenchantment with Henry by involvement with a Peruvian, Gonzalo More, who wooed her in Spanish. But the war caught up with her, too. She returned with a thousand other artist migrants to New York. "Now I see that the extraordinary was in my own vision," which of course was what Paris had been for them all. It was February 1940 and Nin was renting an apartment on Washington Square West. "I thought about Otto Rank, and wondered how he was." So she called: "When I telephoned this morning I could not believe the voice that told me he had died of a throat infection." She could not believe it "because of his vitality and love of life." "Did Rank die not knowing perhaps how much or how deep was his gift, how vivid his human presence?"
Hitler's armies were on the move that May: Holland, Belgium, France: "Impossible to think of anything else, to feel anything else." The machines had taken over. Paris was empty when the Fiihrer arrived under the morning sun for his show at the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower shrouded in mist before him and the modern grey walls of the Trocadero rising on either side—like the thighs of a woman giving birth.