therapy
I put my faith in therapy as others do in religion, or philosophy.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 175.
Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated November 18, 1949, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 92.
If psychoanalysis is going to divest me of all decoration, costume, adornment, flavor, characteristic, then what will be left?
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 1 1931–1934) (New York: The Swallow Press, 1966), 119.
Counterphobic, a shrink once called it, meaning I run fast toward any event I suspect might be excruciating.
Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 94.
One day when I got home at Fourteen Wright Street, Judy opened the door and looked so stricken that I said, “Judy, what’s happened? Has Tom Jones died?” That was our cat. She said, “No, but Volta Hall has had a heart attack and died.” I suppose this is one of the most terrifying blows life has to offer: when your psychiatrist disappears. Within the next two days I wrote an elegy for Volta Hall which is in the Collected Poems and in which the repeated line is, “Now the long lucid listening is done.” I sent this to his widow with a bunch of violets. There was no reply. I thought perhaps there is an unwritten rule that the wife of a psychiatrist does not make contact with a patient even after he himself has died. So I thought no more about it. About ten years later I had a note from her asking if she could come to see me. She came and told me that I would never know what that poem had meant, that she could give it to her children so they could see what her husband and their father had been for so many patients and what he was in himself. She also came—and this touched me deeply—to ask my blessing on her remarriage, as though I was speaking, in a way, for Volta. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s what he would want.’
You never know, when you send out a bird with an olive branch in its beak, whether it will come back or not.
Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 130–31.
Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 1 1931–1934) (New York: The Swallow Press, 1966), 126.
Therapy, you might say, became a kind of release valve for my life; it gave me a place to say the things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world — and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.
“My Life in Therapy,” The New York Times, August 4, 2010.