title: Anaïs Nin and the developmental use of the creative process.
abstract: Anaïs Nin had the capacity to work through the wound of self-injury through the combination of poetic and analytic exploration demonstrated in her writing. She recreated her father, and confronted the fallacies of her idealization, as well as the suppressed anger that kept her enslaved in wishes for his mirroring admiration. There was no escape from injury for Nin. After the father's departure, she scrutinized herself for flaws, trying to discover a reason for her father's betrayal. Yet, the humiliation was modified by some knowledge of the narcissistic bind that she was in, and by some evidence that her father was unworthy of the kind of worship that she clung to from childhood. Nin transcends retaliation. Her fictional abandonment of her father does not come from vindictiveness. Rather, it comes through growing insight into herself and into her own needs. There is a letting-go of past fantasies of idealization, and a mourning process that is based on both awareness and acceptance of the disappointments in these idealized fantasies. Separation and loss stem from surrendering the fusion with the idealized object and its counterpart grandiose self, a grandiose self seen here as a false self that exists through resonating with image projections and their reflections.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kavaler-Adler
mesh_terms: D003405:Creativity; D005197:Famous Persons; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D006117:Grief; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D009289:Narcissism; D009769:Object Attachment; D012649:Self Concept