difficult it was for a woman to achieve them than for a man. In his book he speaks constantly about the “creative will.” I even forgot that expression and used instead my own, which is stubbornness. I said very often that I was more stubborn than other writers. I would not give up, I have never given up, but I didn’t call it creative will. It is a beautiful phrase.
This creative will sometimes manifests itself very early in life. At the age of nine I was in danger of losing my life. A doctor made a mistaken diagnosis and said I had tuberculosis of the hip and would never walk again. My instant reaction was to ask for pencil and paper and begin to make written portraits of my whole family, to write poems. I even put on the front page of these notes “Member of the French Academy,” which to me seemed the highest honor awarded to a writer. This is an attitude of defiance, it is actually the refusal to despair, the refusal to bow down to the human condition, human sorrows, human handicaps. Last-minute surgery saved my life. But this is where the writing began. It was a dramatization of the artist’s solution to the obstacles of life. All my life I have talked and written a great deal about the artist. It was often misunderstood as cultist, excluding nonartists and uncreative people, but this was not so. I love nonartists as well, but for me the artist simply means one who can transform ordinary life into a beautiful creation with his craft. But I did not mean creation strictly applied only to the arts, I meant creation in life, the creation of a child, a garden, a house, a dress. I was referring to creativity in all its aspects. Not only the actual products of art, but the faculty for healing, consoling, raising the level of life, transforming it by our own efforts. I was talking about the creative will, which Dr. Rank opposed to neurosis as our salvation. When I went to see him (I was twenty-eight years old or so) I felt oppressed and actually trapped by my human commitments, by the human condition particularly applied to woman with her training for devotion, service, loyalty to her personal world. I started with the usual handicaps which I share with so many: the broken home, uprooting to a strange country whose language I did not know. Everything contributed to create an alienated child. I found it extremely difficult to enter the flow of life, difficult and painful because there was always the double struggle which Dr. Rank describes in
Truth and Reality:
the conflict between being different and wanting to be close to others. I felt different but I longed for friendship and love. The struggle to maintain my difference was accentuated by the cultural contrasts and uprooting, the problem of language. I was holding on to the values I had been taught, yet I wanted to be admitted to the adopted culture. I finally learned the language, and actually fell in love with English. But the two cultures worked against my sense of unity, two cultures which were opposites, the European and the American.
When I went to see Dr. Rank, instead of tackling the immediate problems, the difficulties in my relationships, the conflicts of cultures, the conflicts between fiction writer and diarist, between woman and writer, he instantly realized the seriousness of my existence as a writer. He focussed on the strongest element in my divided and chaotic self. No matter what disintegrating influences I was experiencing, the writing was the act of wholeness. What he did was to practice his own philosophy, which was to disregard the negativities we usually bring to the therapist and focus on the most positive element in my nature, which was the stubborn concern with writing. I was amazed that he left aside the human problems. Later I realized what a stroke of genius this was. First of all he asked me to put my diary down on his table, in other words to give it up as a hiding place, a place for secrets, for a separate existence. So I would share
This creative will sometimes manifests itself very early in life. At the age of nine I was in danger of losing my life. A doctor made a mistaken diagnosis and said I had tuberculosis of the hip and would never walk again. My instant reaction was to ask for pencil and paper and begin to make written portraits of my whole family, to write poems. I even put on the front page of these notes “Member of the French Academy,” which to me seemed the highest honor awarded to a writer. This is an attitude of defiance, it is actually the refusal to despair, the refusal to bow down to the human condition, human sorrows, human handicaps. Last-minute surgery saved my life. But this is where the writing began. It was a dramatization of the artist’s solution to the obstacles of life. All my life I have talked and written a great deal about the artist. It was often misunderstood as cultist, excluding nonartists and uncreative people, but this was not so. I love nonartists as well, but for me the artist simply means one who can transform ordinary life into a beautiful creation with his craft. But I did not mean creation strictly applied only to the arts, I meant creation in life, the creation of a child, a garden, a house, a dress. I was referring to creativity in all its aspects. Not only the actual products of art, but the faculty for healing, consoling, raising the level of life, transforming it by our own efforts. I was talking about the creative will, which Dr. Rank opposed to neurosis as our salvation. When I went to see him (I was twenty-eight years old or so) I felt oppressed and actually trapped by my human commitments, by the human condition particularly applied to woman with her training for devotion, service, loyalty to her personal world. I started with the usual handicaps which I share with so many: the broken home, uprooting to a strange country whose language I did not know. Everything contributed to create an alienated child. I found it extremely difficult to enter the flow of life, difficult and painful because there was always the double struggle which Dr. Rank describes in
Truth and Reality:
the conflict between being different and wanting to be close to others. I felt different but I longed for friendship and love. The struggle to maintain my difference was accentuated by the cultural contrasts and uprooting, the problem of language. I was holding on to the values I had been taught, yet I wanted to be admitted to the adopted culture. I finally learned the language, and actually fell in love with English. But the two cultures worked against my sense of unity, two cultures which were opposites, the European and the American.
When I went to see Dr. Rank, instead of tackling the immediate problems, the difficulties in my relationships, the conflicts of cultures, the conflicts between fiction writer and diarist, between woman and writer, he instantly realized the seriousness of my existence as a writer. He focussed on the strongest element in my divided and chaotic self. No matter what disintegrating influences I was experiencing, the writing was the act of wholeness. What he did was to practice his own philosophy, which was to disregard the negativities we usually bring to the therapist and focus on the most positive element in my nature, which was the stubborn concern with writing. I was amazed that he left aside the human problems. Later I realized what a stroke of genius this was. First of all he asked me to put my diary down on his table, in other words to give it up as a hiding place, a place for secrets, for a separate existence. So I would share
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