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Go to the beginning Blue Notebook (Anna's diary) (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Anna summarizes how she writes several concise, factual entries and then crosses them all out, scribbling in a more desperate type of handwriting that her experiment with truthfulness in the Blue notebook has failed. She expected the Blue notebook to be most truthful, but is now embarrassed at its emotionalism and inaccuracies. She writes about her conversation with her analyst Mrs. Marks in which she accuses the other woman of putting across an impatient reaction whenever Anna wants to analyze her feelings in an intellectual way, and only smiling in approval when Anna examines her feelings in the context of folklore or mythology. Anna makes the point that the essence of both living fully and neuroses is experiencing conflict – and the essence of being sane and functional is the ability to "block off to what goes on [conflict]." So obviously therapy works by encouraging people to block off and experience less of what's unbearable in life: to live instead inside myths and dreams. Anna admits that she herself finds the mythology of her dreams highly seductive because it means her pain is safely contained in the story and can't hurt her. But she knows she has to get to the next stage in her life where she leaves the safety of myth and walks forward alone. Mrs. Marks points out that Anna first started doing psychoanalysis because she couldn't feel anything, and now she's regained the ability to feel. Anna admits that her ability to feel pain now has made her stronger, but she doesn't like Mrs. Marks's insistence that she separate herself from the experience of her pain by classifying it as just another piece in the great mosaic of human experience. Anna believes instead that she's experiencing things that no other woman has ever experienced before. Gently Mrs. Marks says that there have always been creative, sexually independent women out there. Anna disagrees, arguing that the time period in which she lives makes all the difference. Women in the past never faced what she does now in the nuclear age: the potential of total annihilation, but also total realization of all her dreams. Anna adds that sometimes she meets people who seem split or cracked open, and she thinks that they might be keeping themselves open for something important and new. Mrs. Marks turns the conversation back to Anna's writing, urging her to get back to it. Anna gets impatient, claiming that she could never provide enough context to get across the truth. She claims that people want art to have a message, but are disturbed by "formless" works of art that claim everything is meaningless. |
