In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) Read Online Free Page A

in everything creative, but I sought always to strengthen and reveal the pattern of women. Women were my patterns for living, men for thinking. When I was thirteen and fourteen, Joan of Arc was my heroine. After all, she went to war for a man and not for herself. There are so few women who have found real freedom for themselves. I think of Ninon de Lenclos in the seventeenth century and Lou Andreas-Salomé in the nineteenth. The symbolic people and their freedom are important to the new consciousness. Women must stop reacting against what
is.
They should be making the new woman very clear to us.
    Q: What for you is the “new woman”?
    AN: In my works, I had portrayed free women, free love; but I had done it quietly and these “new women” were not perceived. There is no one pattern for the new woman. She will have to find her own way. This is the work to be done, but it will have to be done individually. Women want a pattern, but there is no pattern for all women.
    Q: Much has been made by Women’s Liberation of Freud’s biases against women. Did these biases affect you, in your own analysis?
    AN: I really can’t answer that question. I haven’t read Freud in a long time, but I do remember Dr. Otto Rank, who analyzed me in Paris, saying that we didn’t really understand the psychology of women, that women had not yet articulated their experience. Men invented soul, philosophy, religion. Women have perceptions that are difficult to describe, at least in intellectual terms. These perceptions come instantly from intuition, and the woman trusts them. What bothers Women’s Lib about Freud doesn’t bother me. Psychology helped me. I very much felt the inner necessity to grow. The ideologies—as Rank said—may have been made by men, but I used only what was useful to me.
    Q: Why has active interest in the erotic been so long taboo for women?
    AN: Men must have invented the taboo. I think of Fellini. He dramatized his unconscious life in
8 ½
; but, when he filmed his wife’s unconscious life in
Juliet of the Spirits,
he didn’t allow her any adventures. She was a passive spectator. For him, woman is only pure by faithfulness and abstention. D. H. Lawrence was the first to acknowledge that woman has a sexuality, a life of her own, and that lovemaking can originate with the woman. Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry. But if a woman writes openly about her need—for example, Violette Leduc or Caitlin Thomas, the widow of Dylan Thomas—she is damned.
    I have always admitted the sexual appetite and given it a great place in my work. One of my books was called
This Hunger.
Henry Miller did a lot to break the canonization of women. Some women, like men, would rather be treated as sexual objects than be canonized. Women don’t like being romanticized or idealized any more than they like being insulted or humiliated.
    Q: What are the defining limits of masculinity and femininity?
    AN: I have tried to lessen the distinctions. I wanted to show all the relationships and establish the fluid connections beyond sex. I found in literature more descriptions of obstacles than relationships. I was seeking to establish the flow and let all the rest fall into place. I wanted to eliminate boundaries, taboos, limitations. In the old novels, there were the differences of class, race, religion. I wanted to leap over all that and reach the instinctive and intuitive connections.
    Q: What for you is the contrast between the feeling life of men and women?
    AN: They meet. There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men
accept
the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive. Analysis we’ve always thought of as masculine—that was the area in which I was able to talk to men. But all those differences are disappearing. We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a