On Trauma, Time, and Anaïs Nin

I've been reading non-fiction by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in the hopes of transporting myself back to a time I've romanticized as being the height of literary community. I love the little insights into their thinking, their processes, and their feelings. I also like seeing what the world was like a hundred years ago without social media, KFC's Double Down sandwich, or Microsoft Word. I mean, sure, they had Nazis by then, so it's not all that different from America 2026, but still... what a fascinating window into the past.

I want to go to there: Paris, 1932

For those of you who didn't have a copy of Delta of Venus on the communal bookshelf in your childhood home, Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a French-Cuban writer best known for her diaries, which she began at age eleven and continued for most of her life. Though she published fiction and erotic literature that I read too early in life, it was her journals (lush and intimate and psychologically self-aware) that secured her place in literary history. She moved in the enviable avant-garde circles of 1930s Paris, alongside Henry Miller and other modernists, and treated her inner life as seriously as any novelist treats their little cyberpunk robot stories.

In 1932, during a period of emotional turbulence and creative searching, Nin began analysis with Dr. René Allendy, a French physician and psychoanalyst affiliated with the early Freudian movement in France. He was part of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and helped introduce Freudian ideas to French intellectual culture. His practice would have been grounded in classical psychoanalysis: dream interpretation, childhood excavation, symbolic meaning... that kind of thing.

Reading about this time in Nin's life gave me pause, not because of what she revealed about herself, but because of the type of help she sought. This was therapy before CBT worksheets, before neuroscience. This was a time when the unconscious was treated like a cathedral with the analyst as its interpreter.

"Oh yeah, that arch looks messed up. Must be tough, huh?"

As someone who spends a lot of time psychoanalyzing his own characters, I started wondering what it must have felt like to sit in that room in 1932. What did therapy mean before we had outcome studies and cognitive distortion and acronyms like EMDR? What did healing look like when the dominant tool was (just) interpretation?

Trauma is trauma in any time period

Meaningless tautologies aside, I was quite surprised to see how self-aware Nin was about her own trauma. I wondered what Dr. Allendy would tell her and how it would compare to what my own therapist might tell me in 2026. How different would their explanations be?

Here's the first passage of note, emphasis mine:

I have suddenly turned cold towards Henry [Miller] because I have witnessed his cruelty to Fred. [...] So the day when Henry willfully hurts Fred, my friendship comes to a stop. It seems absurd. But the fear of cruelty has been the great conflict of my life. I witnessed the cruelty of my father towards my mother, I experienced his sadistic whippings of my brothers and myself, and I saw his cruelty towards animals (he killed a cat with a cane).

The sympathy I felt for my mother reached hysteria when they quarreled, and the terror of their battles, of their angers, grew so great it became paralyzing later, when I became incapable of anger
or cruelty myself. I grew up with such an incapacity for cruelty that it is almost abnormal. When I should show character, I show weakness because of my fear of cruelty.

It was to avoid this conflict that I almost became a recluse. Regression. I fell back into early memories, early states of being, into childhood recollections, and all this prevents me from living in the present.

It's here that Nin decides to seek out Dr. Allendy, and she transcribes some of their conversation.

"And so," said Dr. Allendy, "you withdrew into yourself and be-
came independent. I can see you are proud and self-sufficient. You
fear the cruelty of older men, so, at the first sign of cruelty in any-
one, you are paralyzed."

"Can a child's confidence, once shaken and destroyed, have such
repercussions on a whole life? Why should my father's insufficient
love remain indelible; why was it not effaced by all the loves I received since he left me?"

Nin's question about a child's confidence feels incredibly modern. What fascinates me is how the same wound would be framed so differently across eras while pointing to the same core truth.

In 1932, Allendy, working within classical psychoanalysis, would have understood Nin’s paralysis as the residue of an early paternal injury: an unresolved childhood conflict shaping adult defenses, to be uncovered through insight and interpretation.

By the mid-20th century, attachment theorists like John Bowlby would formalize what Allendy intuited: early bonds create internal working models that echo through a lifetime, like in Gladiator.

Today, trauma research and modalities like EMDR go even further, suggesting that what Nin describes is not merely a psychological narrative but a maladaptively stored memory. Basically, an embodied freeze response that later love cannot simply overwrite. The language has shifted from repression to attachment to neural encoding, but Nin’s question remains startlingly modern: why does the first rupture endure?

There were some red flags

I've only read a page or two past Nin's first encounter with Allendy, and my Google review of his services would probably be not very helpful. I got the sense he didn't want to talk to Nin, and she mentions many times how the doctor dismisses her or tells her she is fine. She's the one that has to chase him to continue treatment.

That was just the vibe I was getting, and then I read this:

Dr. Allendy said, "Women have contributed nothing to psychoanalysis. Women's reactions are still an enigma, and psychoanalysis will remain imperfect as long as we have only men's knowledge on
which to base our assumptions. We assume that a woman reacts like
a man, but we do not know. Man's vanity is greater than a woman's
-because his whole life is based on a manly cult of conquering,
from the Dark Ages, when the one who could not hunt and was not
strong died. His vanity is immense, and the wounds to it are vital
and fatal."

Oh. Oh no.

Well, on the one hand, Allendy is saying something rather progressive for 1932: that psychoanalysis is incomplete because it has been built almost entirely on male experience. He acknowledges that women’s inner lives have been interpreted through a male lens, that assumptions have been universalized without sufficient understanding. Freud’s theories were famously phallocentric, and here is a male analyst admitting the epistemological gap. (I learned that word today; best $10 I ever spent.)

And yet.

The tone carries an air of distance. Women are still an enigma. Their reactions are unknowable. There’s something almost anthropological in it, as if womanhood were a case study rather than a lived reality sitting across from him on the couch. Even when gesturing toward imbalance, he remains the authority describing the imbalance.

What strikes me, reading this from a modern vantage point, is how therapy has gradually shifted from explaining women to listening to them. Mid-20th century psychology began to challenge Freud’s more reductive ideas, but it wasn’t until second-wave feminism (see Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center) that serious critique entered the consulting room. By the time we reach contemporary practice, the framework changes again: trauma-informed care, gender-aware research, intersectionality.

The question is no longer how do women differ from men in reacting but how has power shaped what we thought was normal?

Allendy’s comment sits in that murky middle space. He senses the flaw in the system but still speaks from inside it. And Nin, characteristically, is the one doing the real excavation—of herself, of her father’s anger, of her paralysis in the face of cruelty. Reading it now, I can’t help but feel that she was already ahead of the room she was sitting in.

We're all a little damaged

Maybe damaged isn't the right word. Or it's the right word with the wrong connotation. Either way, I liked reading Nin's reaction to therapy:

Psychoanalysis does force one to be more truthful. Already I realize certain feelings I was not aware of, like the fear of being hurt. I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.

Oh, my friend.

The language changes, the theories change, and the acronyms multiply, but even a hundred years later, we all still want the same thing: to be loved without fear of being hurt.

Maybe we aren’t damaged so much as shaped... by early absences, by what we did to survive. Nin calls herself hypersensitive, abnormal, too hungry for reassurance, but what she describes sounds less like defect and more like the adaptation and coping skills we still use today.

The words have softened over time. We say trauma instead of weakness, attachment instead of dependency. But the ache is the same, whether we can express it in mediocre science fiction novels or not.

Burning for the ancient heavenly connection

Nin was writing in 1932, in Paris, on a couch across from a Freudian analyst. I’m writing in 2026, on an overpowered gaming rig, with a dozen browser tabs opened to Wikipedia articles about psychotherapy. The contexts couldn’t be more different. And yet the emotional content is identical. Fear of being hurt. Hunger to be understood. Shame at needing reassurance. The quiet hope that someone will see us clearly and not turn away.

That’s why some, if not most, of us write.

Her diaries are more direct than fiction, but the impulse behind them is the same impulse that drives any story worth reading. We are trying to transmit feeling across time. Not just events or plot, but the beautiful turmoil of being alive.

My life will not resemble the life of someone reading this in 2126. The technologies will change. The diagnoses will change. The language will evolve again. But the ache of abandonment, the pride of self-sufficiency, and the longing to be loved without fear will still be recognizable even then.

One day, my obituary will say I was a military brat, a husband, a father, a man who wrote books that didn’t quite catch fire the way he hoped. None of that may matter historically. But the feelings attached to those roles... the displacement, the loyalty, the small humiliations, the stubborn hope... those are transferable through my stories.

That’s the miracle of writing. It carries the essence of human experience forward. It is proof that even as the world rearranges itself time and time again, we have been fundamentally human the whole time.

I never even got past PSY 301

But I’m no psychologist. I can barely keep my fictional characters emotionally regulated. Still, when I read Nin describing her fear of cruelty and her longing to be loved without flinching, it doesn’t feel antiquated.

That human ache just keeps echoing clearly century after century.

That’s reason enough to keep writing.