The narrative construction of 'non-trauma': The fantasy of therapeutic incest in Anaïs Nin's journal
The narrative construction of 'non-trauma': The fantasy of therapeutic incest in Anaïs Nin's journal

Summary/Abstract: Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) is widely known for her erotic fiction, her controversial personal life, and her monumental journal, published in instalments during her lifetime and later in an uncensored version in the 1990s. This unexpurgated edition revealed that she had engaged in an incestuous relationship with her father, the composer Joaquín Nin (1879-1949), in 1933. In her journal, Nin presents the episode through a combination of introspective reflection and explicit detail, while narratively foregrounding what appears to be an absence of the guilt, shame, and trauma typically associated with incest. This article does not take that absence as an objective psychological fact; rather, it examines how Nin's self-representation rhetorically constructs the experience as potentially therapeutic. Within her writing, the sexualization of the father-daughter relationship is framed as a way of reworking earlier narratives of abandonment and emotional injury, a framing that can be read as part of a broader process of narrative control. Accordingly, this contribution analyzes the discursive strategies through which Nin stages incest as "non-traumatic," interrogating the fantasy of healing that emerges within her textual and psychic economy rather than positing the experience itself as emancipatory or curative.

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