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Marion Milner: A Life of One's Own; An Experiment in Leisure; On Not Being

Able to Paint; The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic
Treatment; Eternity's Sunrise...

Article  in  The American Journal of Psychoanalysis · September 2012

DOI: 10.1057/ajp.2012.15 · Source: PubMed

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 The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2012, 72, (287–314)
© 2012 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/12
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Book Reviews

A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner, Routledge, London and New York,
1934/2011, 224pp.

An Experiment in Leisure, by Marion Milner, Routledge, London and New York,

1937/2011, 224pp.

On Not Being Able to Paint, by Marion Milner, Routledge, London and New York,
1957/2011, 272pp.

The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment,

by Marion Milner, Routledge, London and New York, 1969/2011, 552pp.

Eternity’s Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary, by Marion Milner, Routledge,

London and New York, 1987/2011, 248pp.

REDISCOVERING THE ENDURING POWER OF MARION MILNER’S WORK

I first encountered Marion Milner through her writings on creativity, compiled
along with her other psychoanalytic papers in the volume The Suppressed
Madness of Sane Men (1987a). In these papers, I found a kindred spirit who was
intimately aware of many of the challenges and rewards of creative engagement.
Here was a woman who was both an artist and a psychoanalyst, who seemed
to learn from the inside out, a position with which I am intimately familiar. More
than anyone else I had found, she described learning as a creative process, best
achieved through an absorption in one’s chosen medium. I used Milner’s writings
to support the development of my own ideas about both psychoanalysis and the
creative process, thinking of her as something of a mentor, a touchstone at times.
She came to reside in my mind as one of those familiar beings whose offerings
become part of the ballast that helps us keep our bearings in the difficult work
of psychoanalysis.
It was not until relatively recently that the reissue by Routledge of Milner’s works
brought forth the opportunity to read her earlier works and revisit the clinical works
with which I was more familiar. In a field in which the female perspective has in
many ways remained a “dark continent”, Milner’s recounts of her own personal
journey are both illuminating and vitalizing. Beginning at the beginning, in A Life
of One’s Own (1934/2011), I encountered the young Milner (or “Joanna Field”, as
she called herself) in her 20s, not yet touched or constrained by a formal study of
psychoanalysis, earnestly trying to understand her own internal complexities. I
recognized the attempt to define herself in her own terms as, in part, the woman’s
effort to write the story of her life without becoming overly skewed by the way it
might be written from another angle.
288 BOOK REVIEWS

In this effort, we can see the kind of grappling with tensions between received
knowledge and wisdom that is inherent in the ways in which psychoanalytic theory
has been passed along. This tension seems to be at the heart of a dilemma we find
perhaps most explicitly in Bion and Lacan, described by Bion in terms of tensions
between the “mystic” or “new idea” and the “Establishment”, and by Lacan in terms
of tensions between Master and Slave, master and student, in which we only upend
ourselves in our expectation that we will find the answers in the other. Because of
ways in which women have been written over and excluded from a conversation that
pretends to be about them, it is noteworthy how directly Milner takes up the question
of “what does a woman want?” In particularizing the question and attempting to answer
it for herself, Milner affirms the importance of that very particularity. “So it seemed
I had assumed that the only desirable way to live was a male way”, she writes,
I had tried to live a male life of objective understanding and achievement. Always, however,
I had felt that this was not what really mattered to me, and as soon as I tried to question my
experience I began to discover impulses towards a different attitude, impulses which eventu-
ally led me to find out something of the meaning of psychic femininity. (1934, p. xxxvi)

In the preface to A Life of One’s Own, Milner notes that her reasons for writing
the book were not the same as those for publishing it. The writing came from an
internal recognition that she was profoundly lost, with insufficient sense of where
her own internal compass might lead her. The decision to publish came from her
belief that the method she had discovered could be useful to others in their efforts
to recognize their own values and preferences as distinguished from those promoted
by the culture at large. Thus, at the heart of this effort, we see Milner engaged in
a psychoanalytic method of exploration, undertaken because of the “uneasy suspi-
cion of this gap between knowing and living” (1943, pp. xxxiv–xxxv). Notably, she
undertook this initial effort alone, even though she later underwent a more tradi-
tional psychoanalytic process. In pursuing this 7-year self-exploration in diary form,
however, Milner reaffirms the method that is at the heart of the legacy bequeathed
by Freud: that psychoanalysis is, essentially, a process of self-exploration, whether
or not it is done in the presence of another.
At first, Milner does not even know what she is searching for and is guided,
rather, by the inner insistence that is driven by that very not-knowing.
Possibly the thing that matters, that you are looking for, is like the roots of plants, hidden
and happening in the gaps of your knowledge. But if it was not to be known, what good
was it to me? At that time I had no technique for taking into account what might be in the
gaps of my knowledge. (1934, p. 22)

She begins to be aware of something elusive that she can recognize in the
absorption by others into the aesthetic and sensual aspects of experience, an absorp-
tion she envies.
When seeing films of savage ritual dances, I envy their intense precision and preoccupation.

Often I envy artists, musicians, dancers … I think, though I’m not quite sure, that it’s because
they do one thing well, they show a mastery of technique—no, it’s not that only—I think it’s
the play aspect, I don’t know—precision, colour, symbolism, the language of imagination,
 BOOK REVIEWS 289

the freedom of the spirit, the criteria of what they do is impulse, not utility—freedom from
utility, from reality? Fantasy, lure of folk tales, yet there’s a precision of the imagination
that these people are aiming for even though failing often. It’s not in the films, at least
hardly ever, it’s in music … a description, a simplification and precision, a clarifying
concentration—the flight of gulls at Rye. (1934, p. 30)

Through her method of self-exploration, Milner becomes aware of her own rela-
tive blindness to herself and her desires, discovering that she had been most blind
to what she describes as a “feminine attitude” to the universe that is grounded
in subjective intuition rather than objective understanding. The writing itself was
part of the process of self-discovery.

Not only did I find that trying to describe my experience enhanced the quality of it, but
also this effort to describe had made me more observant of the small movements of the
mind. So now I began to discover that there were a multitude of ways of perceiving, ways
that were controllable by what I can only describe as an internal gesture of the mind. It
was as if one’s self-awareness had a central point of interest being, the very core of one’s
I-ness. And this core of being could, I discovered, be moved about at will; but to explain
just how it is done to someone who has never felt it for himself is like trying to explain
how to move one’s ears … .

The first hint that I really had the power to control the way I looked at things happened in
connexion with music. Always before, my listening had been too much bothered by the
haunting idea that there was far more in it than I was hearing; but occasionally I would
find that I had slipped through this barrier to a delight that was enough in itself, in which
I forgot my own inadequacy. (1934, p. 47)

As she develops a greater appreciation of knowledge acquired through sensory

experience, Milner becomes aware of the diversity of the channels through which
such experience is acquired.

At this time also I began to surmise that there might be different ways of looking as well
as of listening.

One day I was idly watching some gulls as they soared high overhead. I was not interested,
for I recognized them as “just gulls”, and vaguely watched first one and then another. Then
all at once something seemed to have opened. My idle boredom with the familiar became
a deep-breathing peace and delight, and my whole attention was gripped by the pattern
and rhythm of their flight, their slow sailing which had become a quiet dance.

In trying to observe what had happened I had the idea that my awareness had somehow
widened, that I was feeling what I saw as well as thinking what I saw. But I did not know
how to make myself feel as well as think … . (1934, p. 48)

By the end of this particular journey, Milner concludes that these two comple-
mentary tendencies—the receptive and the analytic; the female and the male—are
present in all people, each necessary to contain and enhance the other. Notably,
by undertaking this journey of self-discovery, Milner finds herself, at its end, “now
clear enough about my own findings to be no longer afraid of being confused in
my search by other people’s theories” (1934, p. 167), enabling her to learn more
290 BOOK REVIEWS

freely and to integrate what she learns rather than overwriting her own under-
standing with the ideas of others.
At the core of Milner’s understanding, developed in this first book, is an appre-
ciation of the tensions between what she terms the male and female aspects of
being. This tension had been fed by her own lack of appreciation of the feminine
aspects and, more importantly, the lack of a model through which to recognize
and integrate both aspects. She recognizes her own tendency to valorize the mascu-
line, and wonders about the fear of surrender to the feminine. She wonders in
relation to the “blind thinking” she associates with excessive, narrowly circum-
scribed reason whether

with its inability to see more than one thing at once, the satisfaction of the female meant
the wiping out of the male forever? To satisfy the desire for surrender to the full without the
loss of one’s individuality, perhaps this was an idea beyond the powers of blind thinking
to grasp, since for it things must be either one or the other. And in its terror of losing the
male in the female it had in fact lost both. (1934, p. 170)

As Milner considers the relationships between female and male and passive and
active, she suggests that either principle is crippled without the other.

So my discovery of a natural rhythm of awareness was perhaps the discovery that

reflective thinking requires a subtle balance of male and female activity. Was it not true,
or at least useful, to say that as long as I remained female in all my thinking I was passive
towards it, leaving it to think itself, unexpressed and unwatched, so that it had all the
characteristics I have described for blind thinking, which Piaget called egocentric?
(1934, p. 172)

Increasingly, she is convinced that duality is an important precondition for true

reflectiveness. “I had undoubtedly been quite at sea about how to live my life until
I had learnt to make that active gesture of separation and detachment by which
one stands aside and looks at one’s experience” (1934, p. 172).
In her second book, An Experiment in Leisure (1937/2011), Milner takes on the
challenge of trying to better understand how her preferences do or do not guide
her activities. She begins by wondering where her interests lead her and to what
extent her feelings of interest are trustworthy guides. She was driven to ask the
latter question, she says, because of a “growing uneasiness over the anti-intellectual
trends of modern life” (1937, p. xiii). Milner begins by thinking back over where
her interests had led her thus far, beginning with a passion for naturalism that began
at age 11. This was also where her interest in diary keeping had begun, having “read
somewhere that the first essential for a naturalist was to keep notes” (1937, p. 2).
Whereas, at first, thinking over her interests and passions seemed to be a direct
challenge, this endeavor quickly becomes more complicated. Recalling a somewhat
later interest in witchcraft and pagan rituals, for example, led Milner to the aware-
ness that “one could actually want to submit to an apparently destroying force”
(1937, p. 28). At first, she said, she had taken her interest in witchcraft literally,
considering becoming an anthropologist. She was learning, however, “how my
mind continually used the ideas of interpersonal happenings as a means of thinking,
in a dim way, about those of my personal problems which I had not yet been able
 BOOK REVIEWS 291

to admit or think about more directly” (1937, p. 30). This insight led Milner to
connect her preoccupation with the ritual of the killing of a god to an internal act
of wiping out the good, “the wiping out of myself, of all my plans and purposes
and confidence in my own powers” (1937, p. 31).
By making these connections, Milner could see that we use symbols both as a
means for evading difficult facts and also as a way of facing them. Increasingly,
she was able to recognize that the internal inhibition that led her to ignore her own
feelings increased her misery, whereas

when recognized and deliberately allowed, it seemed to have an opposite effect. In fact,
I thought that if I could always deliberately allow it, my life would be different, infinitely
richer and without fear. But apparently I could only rarely allow it, most of the day
I was forbidding this impulse, building up bulwarks to try and protect my identity. (1937,
p. 40)

She suspects a “hidden misunderstanding” that she might discover if she paid atten-
tion to the wanderings of her mind, consistent with readings she had done from
Freud about the forces of the unconscious and being lived by experience rather
than being in control of it. Although this sense of being lived by experience was
something familiar, as in moments of listening to music and at times slipping more
fully into the experience, it was also in some ways frightening, as though it might
be too enlarging and she might lose herself.
And so, Milner’s “experiment in leisure” quickly turns into an encounter with
the unconscious, which she explores through dreams, reverie, and the creation of
her own fairy story, which she later explores. She learns to notice her own internal
sense of truth, lie, and also of importance, the “haunting sense of its importance,
this sense that I had learnt was not to be ignored, since as long as an experience
haunted me, I knew there was something I had not understood about it” (1937,
p. 86). Milner comes to recognize, paradoxically, that acceptance of a painful
thought is often a preliminary to relieving the pain, and that this acceptance is often
accompanied by a feeling of being more imaginatively alive and more intensely
real. This leads her to wonder whether it is “possible that it is only by such an act
that one can ever see the truth at all, [that] as long as you are fighting against the
pain you cannot understand what brought it about” (1937, p. 88). These musings
lead her back to the theme of the killing of a god, to wonder whether the power
of the crucifixion has to do not only with a magical belief in the power of a sacri-
fice to bring salvation, but also “to the fact that it was the culminating poetic
dramatization of an inner process of immense importance to humanity, a process
which was not an escape from reality, but the only condition under which the inner
reality could be fully perceived” (1937, p. 103). In this way, Milner’s struggles to
make sense of links between myth, meaning, and metaphor point to ways in which
myths and metaphor anchor essential truths waiting to be recognized at their deeper
levels.
Increasingly, as this book progresses, Milner seems to be searching for an internal
truth that, paradoxically, resists being sought. To illustrate this paradox, she brings
in Keats’ notion of negative capability, “that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”
292 BOOK REVIEWS

(Keats, in Milner, 1937, p. 104). In this process, she found that religious images of
many sorts came to her mind.
Certainly my mind seemed to be using these images in order to think about the process
of coming to know my own experience, and it certainly seemed to prefer them, as instru-
ments of reflection, to the more usual and accepted terms of logic and reason. It seemed
to prefer them because they brought meaning and order into the chaos of raw feeling,
whereas conscious reasoning could not touch the chaos. (1937, p. 119)

She was increasingly convinced that the power of images was enhanced by the
fact that they were layered, holding metaphor within metaphor, such that the riddle
of the image could not be simply or absolutely resolved. “I began to see these
images that held me with such power and had such a quality of being ‘truly real’
as striding the gulf between the inner and the outer, between crude physical facts
of bodily life and the truths of the growth of mind” (1937, p. 128).
Pulling outward, then, Milner begins to focus on seeing her impulses within a
wider context. An idea she had written of several years before comes forward, “this
idea of crystallization had developed through the months till I had become full of
this thought of shaping one’s life into a whole, in order to possess it” (1937,
p. 129). Recollecting, too, moments of passionate immersion in which “I had felt
the earth as a living thing—and for an instant, had felt as though my own body
were the earth” (1937, p. 131), she goes on to speculate that if each of these
experiences
is the first intimation of something I am going to find in myself, in my own personal experi-
ence, in day to day living with others, then I am sure I must not stop at mystery or mysti-
cism, it is everyday human experience that comes first and last and all the time. The rest is
only a help to understanding it, instruments of reflection. (1937, p. 131)

Her conviction grows that all of her interests have led her in the same direction,
and that in embracing them all she can better see her own imprint in them. Her
interest in the natural world, religious ritual, sex, and symbols, “all of these were
equally apt ways of talking about either the powers of generation in the body, or
the unknown creative depths of mind” (1937, p. 132). She is aware of “the myste-
rious force by which one is lived, the ‘notself’, which was yet also in me, it was
this force that I must learn to know, and to remember continually without fear, a
force which had seemed sometimes like a beast within, sometimes like a god”
(1937, pp. 133–134). In some ways, these forces rage in storms of emotion, often
against her will, “certainly these were not anything to be trusted. But I could see
now how gradually there had grown an awareness of another aspect of it, gradually
I had become aware that there was something else in me, something that knew as
well as felt, something more than gusty wayward impulse” (1937, p. 134).
As Milner attains a greater appreciation of the wilder forces inside her, she also
becomes increasingly aware that her determination to “get things done” has led
her astray.
Now, deeper than all my practical ambitions and belief in action, was the guess that Yeats
was right, that in fact the forms in which man expresses his sense of being alive are as
powerful a force for change, though in a different way, as any deliberate attempt to get
 BOOK REVIEWS 293

things done, because it is these which change men’s hearts—particularly one’s own heart.
(1937, p. 140)

In concluding this book, Milner notes the gap between the experience and the
words to say it, recognizing that in some ways the image has afforded her a way
of accepting and working with this gap. This acceptance, working within the param-
eters of what is, becomes a larger principle, for her, of submission as an internal
gesture. She ends with a discussion of the power and danger of the images that are
“really outward and visible signs of inward experience … their power in controlling
mood must lie in the fact that, unlike abstract ideas and reasoning, their outward-
ness was deeply rooted in simple sensation, in the concreteness of colour and shape
and texture and sound and movement” (1937, p. 168). She recognizes that the very
potency of these images can lead to a belief in a concrete truth that can be used
for exploitation.
And the way to ensure that I would use these images in the service of truth of experience
rather than as bogus pictures of external fact seemed to be the repeated ritual gesture of
giving up my private desires. This seemed to be my answer to the question of whether the
feeling of importance about any idea could ever be trusted. (1937, p. 169)

In 1957, Milner published her fourth book, through which she explored her
ideas about education and creativity. On Not Being Able to Paint (1957/2011) was
catalysed by Milner’s experiences working within the educational system (described
in The Human Problem in Schools, 1938), which left her convinced that a new
method for learning was required in order to effectively teach subjects that in any
way involved psychic creativity. Intuiting that this investigation should be taken
up indirectly, rather than in reference to other people’s ideas about education or
aesthetic theory, Milner proposed to answer her questions through her own expe-
rience. Using the personal method she had been developing, she set about to study
her own difficulties with painting, in an attempt to explore factors that facilitated
and inhibited her own creative process. This idea
was in fact the result of a most surprising discovery, one of those happenings which seem
to occur by inadvertence but which afterwards are recognized as marking a turning point
in one’s life. It was the discovery that it was possible at times to produce drawings and
sketches in an entirely different way from any that I have been taught, a way of letting hand
and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working to a preconceived
intention. (1957, p. xviii)

Much as Milner had learned the power of unfocused thinking through her first
effort at journal writing, so, too, she now learns that the process of painting is facil-
itated when she can allow her unconscious to guide her efforts. The success of this
method not only confirms misgivings she has about the educational system, but also
affords new insights. Just as the process of drawing showed her something about what
was problematic in the education system in terms of inhibiting and repressing crea-
tive engagement, so, too, the content of her drawings shed light on these problems
in other ways. The “phantastic” nature of these drawings shows Milner that the images
thus produced “were not only clues to unconscious ‘complexes’, they were a form
of visual reflection on the basic problems of living—and of education; and being so,
294 BOOK REVIEWS

they were intimately connected, both in their content and their method, with the
problems of creativity and the creative process” (1957, p. xviii).
Through this process, Milner comes to her own appreciation of something that
Suzanne Langer (1951) spoke of in her book Feeling and Form in terms of the
fundamental order that emerges in terms of the forms created in the artistic process.
These forms emerge as “symbols for the life of feeling, creating ways in which the
inner life may be made knowable” (1957, p. 186). In this way, Milner comes to
recognize the vital purpose of art as offering an enduring representation of an
internal experience.
Since this inner life is the life of a body, with all its complexities of rhythms, tensions,
releases, movement, balance, and taking up room in space, so surely the essential thing
about the symbols is that they should show in themselves, through their formal pattern,
a similar theme of structural tensions, and balances and release, but transfigured into a
timeless visual co-existence. Thus the artist, surely amongst other things that he is doing, is
making available for recall and contemplation, making able to be thought about, what he
feels to be the most valuable moments in this feeling life of psycho-physical experience.
(1957, p. 186)

These insights about the creative process are also found in Milner’s psychoana-
lytic papers, collected later under the title The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men
(1987a). Milner comes to believe that art, rather than providing a means for
reclaiming a connection with a lost object, creates an opportunity to create a new
object that disrupts our familiarity with the natural world, in this way enabling us
to see something more clearly because the artist “is creating the power to perceive
it” (1957, p. 189). The artist achieves this, she contends, “by unmasking old symbols
and making new ones, thus incidentally making it possible for us to see that the
old symbol was a symbol; whereas before we had thought the symbol was a ‘reality’
because we had nothing to compare it with” (1957, p. 189). In this way, the artist
destroys the illusion of reality and invites greater engagement with the mysteries of
nature in all its complexity. After having made this very personal investigation of
art and the creative process, Milner concludes that art is inevitably personal:
a work of art, whatever its content, or subject, whether a recognizable scene or object or
abstract pattern, must be an externalization, through its shapes and lines and colours, of
the unique psycho-physical rhythm of the person making it. Otherwise it will have no life
in it whatever, for there is no other source for its life. (1957, p. 191)

Milner’s own experiences of being in psychoanalysis then led to her decision to

train to become a psychoanalyst. In The Hands of the Living God, published in
1969, Milner offers an account of her work with a young woman with whom Milner
worked for 20 years. “Susan” “came to her first session saying three things: that
she had lost her soul; that the world was no longer outside her; and that all this
had happened since she received E.C.T. in hospital, 3 weeks before coming to me”
(1969/2011, p. xix). Over time, this patient begins to bring drawings into the
sessions, and Milner eventually uses these drawings as a way to organize the story
of her work with Susan. She does this, she says, because trying to select from the
verbal material she had collected over so many years was too daunting a task,
whereas the drawings contained “in highly condensed form, the essence of what
 BOOK REVIEWS 295

we were trying to understand. In fact I came to see them as my patient’s private

language which anyone who tried to help her must learn how to read—and speak”
(1969, p. xxi).
Although Milner’s original aim in writing this book was to affirm the importance
of offering people this type of intensive investment of time, she comes to realize
that this undertaking was also enabling her to clarify in her own mind certain ideas
that had been evolving through the work she and Susan had done together. In this
process, Milner notices that “certain lines of poetry kept nosing their way into the
foreground of my thinking, lines that had been at the back of my mind at different
stages of the treatment” (1969, p. xxi) but which she had largely pushed aside
because they were her own thoughts, not those of the patient. She comes to realize,
however, that even though these bits of poetry were not directly relevant to the
patient herself, they were, however, extremely relevant to Milner’s own under-
standing of the progress of the work. “They were providing essential bridges in my
own thinking, bridges from the raw material of what she brought me to the final
stage, not yet reached in this book, of my being able to conceptualize it fully in
terms of psycho-analytic theory” (1969, p. xxi). These latter ideas finally come
together in Milner’s psychoanalytic papers, eventually collected in the volume The
Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987a).
In describing the treatment, Milner notes that “it was against a background of
preoccupations both with the nature of creative process and the nature of internal
perception that I began my work with Susan” (1969, p. xxix). We see Milner
attending carefully to all aspects of her experience with Susan, from the visual
presentation to the “conscious daydreams” that afford Milner beginning glimpses
into Susan’s internal world. Initially, Susan is not pleased with how the work is
progressing, but then happens to come upon Milner’s first book. Susan describes
feeling a bit more alive in reading the book. “After this she felt I did perhaps know
a bit about what she was talking of, and her open arrogance subsided” (1969,
p. 38). Early on, Milner notices in Susan a difficulty in thinking that has to do with
“taking in any interpretation that depended upon finding a hidden symbolic
meaning” (1969, p. 40), and a certain concreteness that leads Milner to conclude
that “what I said was often less important than my body-mind state of being in her
sessions” (1969, p. 42).
Milner catalogues for us her inner imaginings through the difficult day by day
experience of sitting with this patient. In many ways, her internal imaginings seem
to keep her alive and she learns not to impose them on her patient. She comes to
believe that her interpretations were often in defense against the discomfort of not-
knowing, and that they likely impeded her patient’s creative process. Milner learns
to try to attend with the full “body-attention” (1969, p. 49) she had discovered
through her journal keeping. This enhanced focus helps her to attend to aspects of
her own behavior that she suspects might be in relation to the patient. In conjunc-
tion with this change of technique, Milner sees signs, through dreams and reports
of pleasurable experiences, which Susan is beginning to come alive again.
After a difficult time because of changes in Susan’s living environment, Susan
begins to draw during her sessions. Initially, Milner describes these drawings as
“scribbles”, but she takes them seriously and tries to understand what Susan might
296 BOOK REVIEWS

be saying through them. In the book, Milner offers us both an account of her
experience of the drawings at the time and also her later reworking of some of their
meanings that she has put together over time. Offering us both the drawings and
her musings about them, Milner invites readers to think along with her and to notice
patterns, ourselves. Striking in this account is how Milner stays with her own
process, at times adding in bits of theory she might have been reading about or
have been aware of at the time, but never allowing the theory to overshadow
whatever meaning the patient might be trying to make.
Much as Milner had paid close attention to Susan in the earlier sessions, she
now pays close attentions to Susan’s productions, having ideas about them but not
forcing her interpretations onto them.
Deeper than the feeling of the dreadful blackness of her heart, based on moral judgements
of her destructive wishes, I thought there was an intuition of her need to find her roots in
darkness; in a “not-knowing” that was not the result of defensive denial but the inescap-
able condition and background to all knowing. (1969, p. 224)

Much as she had done in her own self-explorations, Milner also compiles for
us the themes present in Susan’s drawings, and offers her reflections on these
themes. January of 1959 sees a major change in Susan, who says “I am in the world
for the first time for sixteen years” (1969, p. 375). Susan brings in an excerpt from
her diary that reads:
It is very difficult to communicate things which, although we are aware of so clearly in our
minds, are somehow not transferable into words—and yet the awareness of a reality that I
have not been in contact with for sixteen years … .

The shock of the realization that one could have been unconscious for so long a time
seems almost to send one into unconsciousness again. (1969, p. 375)

I can now remember them as years of blackness. Blackness in mind and heart. Being
unaware of oneself and consequently of other people makes it impossible to observe and
question one’s actions, so one behaves as one will, with no consideration for anybody
or anything. This realization is awful to be conscious of. Not only has one violated the
sense concerning others, but one has also gone against any duty to oneself and one’s own
integrity. (1969, p. 376)

Milner’s musings about her own internal process in relation to Susan’s are remi-
niscent of discoveries she had made in her journal. She is aware of an integrative
internal force that she characterizes as “an organizing pattern-making aspect of
instinct, something, that is, shown in a person’s own particular individual rhythm
and style” (1969, p. 384).
Certainly, some patients seemed to be aware, dimly or increasingly, of a force in them to
do with growth, growth towards their own shape, also as something that seemed to be
sensed as driving them to break down false internal organizations which do not really
belong to them; something which can also be deeply feared, as a kind of creative fury that
will not let them rest content with a merely compliant adaptation; and also feared because
of the temporary chaos it must cause when the integrations on a false basis are in the proc-
ess of being broken down in order that a better one may emerge. (1969, pp. 384–385)
 BOOK REVIEWS 297

She presents these ideas in 1960, and they are eventually published in her collected
papers (1987a) as “Painting and internal body awareness”.
The year 1959 is a turning point in Milner and Susan’s work together, as Susan
moves away from living in others’ homes and towards building a home of her own.
When Susan begins to work more regularly, the sessions are reduced to once or
twice weekly. During this time, Susan’s mother becomes ill and dies. After her
mother’s death, Susan’s struggles increase, to the extent that she is admitted briefly
for inpatient treatment. Susan does manage to get back on her feet, in part through
the assistance of a hostel in which she finds the sense of community she has been
longing for. She eventually marries and establishes her own home. Although she
continues her work with Milner, Susan continues to experience symptoms. Milner
begins to suspect that this impasse might be linked to Milner’s tendency to over-
interpret as a defense against own difficulties in tolerating the chaos. Eventually,
Milner reports, “it became at last possible to create between us an interpretation
that provided a way of looking at her whole life-myth” (1969, p. 398). At that point,
Milner says, she could see that some of what had felt like an obstructive force
coming from Susan could be seen as

in response to a special failure on my part; in fact, whenever I failed to manage our rela-
tionship well enough to enable her to feel that whatever understanding we achieved really
came from her; or rather, from a kind of unity between us that made it not matter whether
she said it or I said it. (1969, p. 406)

This recognition represents a profound insight for Milner, much along the lines
of Winnicott’s (1971) dictum regarding not stealing from the patient by knowing
too much.
During this same period of time when she is working with Susan, Milner returns
to journal writing. In 1987, she publishes another volume that ensues from this
experimentation, after deciding to go back and “repeat the method of my original
experiment and try to see what effects nearly 20 years of practicing as a psycho-
analyst in a rapidly changing world might have had on the nature of the memories
selected and the conclusions to be drawn from them” (1987b/2011, p. xxxv).
Eternity’s Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary might be seen as the fourth in her
series of volumes that arose from her investigations into her own process. In this
volume, she writes explicitly about her method of recording and accumulating
records of the small private moments of her life.
Milner begins this volume with observations made during vacations. The first
entry is made after a trip to Greece. She begins by trying to write a chronological
account but then discovers, much as she had in her previous encounters with
journal writing, that when she stops trying to impose an external order an internal
order emerges. When she allows herself to face what seems at first like merely a
dark confusion, she finds that certain thoughts emerge, like trophies, or what she
calls “beads”, referring to the signal moments that contain both affect and imagery.
“As I watched what had seemed like a tangled mass of fragmented images … some
dimly sensed connecting links appeared to be forming themselves around the ideas
of these objects” (1987b, p. 3). She thus begins to focus on her “trophies” in detail,
and finds that writing about them increases her sense of their significance. She does
298 BOOK REVIEWS

not yet, however, know where the trail was leading. It is only after her second
holiday to Greece that she begins to notice a pattern that intrigues her, in which
an external image is linked with an internal feeling, as in the sense of comfort and
joy in relation to the rocks and stone out of which the statues in the Parthenon had
been “hewn, a deep, undifferentiated all-over-the sameness, their surfaces differen-
tiated into features, limbs, drapery, all played on by light—but within, no light, no
shape. Then finding that I could deliberately reach down to such a feeling in myself”
(1987b, p. 26).
As this exploration proceeds, Milner finds herself “collecting trophies” but also
recognizing the interplay between fine attention to detail and widening her perspec-
tive to take in a larger field of vision. In addition, she discovers that her “identifying
mind” seems to resist “the ‘going under’ into sheer experience” (1987b, p. 31). Her
concern that she might be missing something important enables her to widen her
inner focus. She finds that when she “escaped from the need to name; instead of
scanning the ground for a rarity I had widely stared so that what was there made
a pattern, a rich texture that was deeply satisfying, healing. I needed nothing else”
(1987b, pp. 31–32). Increasingly, she feels that it is important to not just collect
the beads, but also to ponder the “threads”, the ways in which those beads are
linked together. For example, in pondering her memories, she notes that whereas
some memories are connected with a more receptive, deeper breathing, others are
connected with an anxiety that carries a sense of breathlessness. She wonders about
the risk that might be entailed in journeying within.

Of course, to get this sense of renewal and riches from inside one has to turn one’s atten-
tion inwards, wait and guard the inner way, this passage along which the air comes and
goes, a “sacred way”, when one attends to it, because it is out of the depths that this sense
of being in touch with inner riches comes. So—this breathlessness, could it perhaps have
been a premonition of the fears lurking round learning how to turn inward, learning how
to guard the sacred way … Certainly it seems like taking a great risk, for there’s this feeling
that the breath might not come at all … it’s giving up the control of one’s own life, for the
moment, direct facing of this mysteriousness at the source of one’s going on being at all,
a direct meeting face to face with it. (1987b, p. 39)

In considering the possible dangers of the journey inwards, Milner comes to the
themes of darkness and light, anger and grief. This particular tack leads her to
recognize ways in which her professional work could be seen to be explorations
of the same themes that she was exploring in her piecing of the beads. In noticing
these similarities, she likens the beads to poetry “in that they contained many layers
of implicit meanings all condensed into each image” (1987b, p. 48). She becomes
convinced that the work with the beads was enabling her to make contact with an
inner truth, a process that was facilitated by the cultivation of an internal stillness
that was profoundly nourishing. She wonders whether this type of state might be
more accessible to a woman than a man. “Is it perhaps easier for a woman, poten-
tially to do this deliberate letting awareness go down inside away from striving after
assertive action in the outer world, and just letting oneself be breathed?” (1987b,
p. 50). She begins to think of this type of engagement in terms of an “answering
activity”, something that she recognizes as having first had intimations of during
 BOOK REVIEWS 299

her “experiment in leisure”. She references herself from that previous volume: “an
activity that I can only describe as a knowing, yet a knowing that was nothing to
do with me; it was a knowing that could see forwards and backwards and in
a flash give form to the confusion of everyday living and the chaos of sensation”
(in 1987b, p. 51).
In the second half of the book, Milner turns away from her experiences in Greece
and begins to talk about beads she has collected from other places. She groups
them into themes, such as breathing, chaos, grief, faith, silence, and transformation.
Increasingly, she finds that she can recognize and collect beads even though she
does not know what meanings will emerge. She trusts, however, that they will.
Milner ends this volume by looking at the beads more generally as a means of
creating and recognizing symbols that had been meaningful in her life. She suggests
that it is because these symbols are “rooted in sensory experience, yet having a
particular feeling quality, a warmth or glow, … they had acquired the capacity to
act as bridges between the different levels of psychic functioning, integrating mind
and body, thinking and feeling, concepts and percepts, reason and imagination”
(1987b, p. 172). Much as in her original undertaking, described in A Life of One’s
Own, Milner discovers that when she can step back from the position of ego, when
she can remember to say to herself “ ‘I want nothing’, … I would find myself
breathing deeply in the calm impersonality of shapes and colours, or even in a
sudden glimpse of a person’s character seen from a viewpoint that had stepped
clear of the distortions of my personal interests” (1987b, p. 177). Her ability to
become absorbed into an experience facilitates a different way of being in which
her awareness seems to widen, and her capacity to feel is enhanced. She likens
this enhanced state of being to the symbol of lightening of the Kabbala, as a “symbol
of the integrative force that can bring into relatedness the two sides, the inward-
turning and the outward-turning and, on all levels, the growth of the personality”
(1987b, p. 193).
In Milner’s postscript to this volume, she ponders on “the emptiness of the circle”
(1987b, p. 196) that can be a gap, a wound, an aching hole, acknowledging a pain
that one might transform by being willing to face it, to move into it. She ends:

And then, too, out of the held emptiness, there comes a movement, a gesture, a reaching
out to the world again, to the world in which wild flowers grow—and people … Which
now takes me back to the bead of the cat’s cradle, those seconds of interchange, some-
thing invisible happening in the space between. Images of a lifetime of learning to relate
to the other, to the not-me, whether in the outer world or in the inner one, including the
privateness of one’s own body which is yet also part of the outer world. But also relating
to whatever it is that creates this body and goes on creating it, since this is certainly not
me, not the conscious me anyway, I only look after it, I don’t make it happen. So, out of a
meeting of two emerges an unseeable third, a duality becoming a trinity. (1987b, p. 197)

Milner’s lifetime of learning comes together in her collected papers, published

in 1987 under the title The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. These papers were
written between 1942 and 1977, with some afterthoughts written in 1986, just
before the volume was published. In this volume, we see Milner’s clinical papers
and also her papers on art, segments from which have already been noted in
300 BOOK REVIEWS

relation to On Not Being Able to Paint. She begins this volume by likening her
collected papers to branches of a tree, of which the roots could be found in the
memories she had explored in her previous books. In retrospect, she sees her
fascination with the mysteries of the natural world and the unconscious as threads
that bind her various endeavors together.
In her collected papers (1987a), we see Milner in dialogue with self, experience,
and with the ideas she takes from others. Her individualistic, inquisitive style is
prevalent throughout, whether through her own musings or in relation to those she
encounters in books and in person. For example, she describes
feeling grateful that Freud did allow that people like me, who think mainly in images, do
exist. But I did wonder why he mentioned only optical memories; why not also auditory,
kinaesthetic, or even olfactory ones, all of which must play an essential part in mental
activity before the advent of speech. (1987a, p. 59)

Throughout this volume, we see her always in dialogue, digesting, synthesizing,

and integrating.
As early as 1948, Milner is discovering, through her work with Susan (The Hands
of the Living God), ways in which the limits of symbolic thinking bring technical
challenges. In “An adult uses toys”, she writes about Susan’s ability to break through
her own impasse by representing with toys what could not be represented in words.
In this paper, Milner describes how Susan’s play with plasticine could be seen as
preliminary to the drawings that would become so important in their work together.
The issue of symbolization would continue to be an important thread for Milner,
which she takes up repeatedly, first in “The framed gaps” (1952). In that paper, she
links learning acquired through her own efforts at painting (On Not Being Able to
Paint), in which the frame was so essential to the process, to the analytic session
that is framed in both space and time. By analogy, she considers ways in which
the frame is a fundamental aspect of many human activities, a way in which the
inside and outside are delineated in relation to one another. “I thought that all these
frames show that what is inside has to be perceived, interpreted in a different way
from what is outside; they mark off an area within which what we perceive has to
be taken as a symbol, as metaphor, not literally” (1987a, p. 81).
Milner also considers ways in which the emptiness that is marked by the framed
gap represents an important potential space, linking such gaps to the types of self-
awareness so essential to creative activity. These ideas are further expanded in her
1952 paper “The role of illusion in symbol formation”, in which she reports on the
analysis of an 11-year-old boy. She uses aspects of that work to consider ways in
which a child’s play can be viewed as working at the boundary between self and
other, and between illusion and the demands experienced through the encounter
with external reality. She suggests that creation—in whatever medium—can be seen
as forming a bridge between internal and external realities such that the illusion of
impotence can make way for greater capacity to make use of one’s talents in the
world.
Striking in Milner’s work is her openness to what the patient might be saying
back to her in relation to her own evolving ideas regarding how to make sense of
what is going on in the work. For example, in “The communication of primary
 BOOK REVIEWS 301

experience” (1955), Milner describes her work with a young girl who did not speak
for 10 months but rather left notes and drew pictures, the first of which was of a
dog with a wagging tail. “At the end of each session in which she painted she tried
to hurl the paint water full in my face. Interpretations of aggression did not stop
this; but when I interpreted the problem of the tail-wagging, it did stop, and also
the type of drawing changed” (1987a, p. 122). She learns from her patient Susan
the importance of being respectful also to the limits of what the patient can, in the
moment, tolerate. To illustrate, she quotes from Susan: “To adjust oneself in
consciousness, in however small a measure, is a great task, a life’s work no doubt;
but instead of it being gradual, the realization that is, if it comes suddenly it seems
too much to be called upon to bear” (1987a, p. 166).
Milner’s interest in creativity infuses into all of her work. In considering, for
example, the Book of Job, she writes:
I have come to look on Blake’s Job as the story of what goes on in all of us, when we
become sterile and doubt our creative capacities, doubt our powers to love and to work;
and also a story of the battle we all have to go through, to a greater or less degree and
whether we know it or not, in learning how to become able to love and to work. (1987a,
p. 169)

Milner views Job’s dilemma in terms of a lack of recognition of one’s internal

complexity—including evil among the good—that necessitates a descent to the
depths from which one might discover that greater complexity. For Milner, redemp-
tion comes through one’s ability to seek truth beyond the convenient or conven-
tional, a task we can see her engaged in throughout her writings.
In Milner’s later papers, she continues to explore these themes of creative engage-
ment. We see her working at themes that had been prevalent in her journals, such
as the importance of being able to access the unconscious through diffuse attention
and appreciating the possibilities inherent in attaining a state of “pregnant empti-
ness” (1987a, p. 212). She comes to believe that creativity has “to do with the
capacity of the conscious mind to have the experience of cooperating with the
unconscious depths, by means of the battle to express something with the chosen
medium” (1987a, p. 215). This process requires a willingness to encounter, and a
capacity to tolerate, chaos. For Milner, creativity is profoundly personal, an
embodied engagement. In her 1957 paper, “The ordering of chaos”, she takes up
once again the theme of art as an opportunity to put forms into feeling, thus “creating
symbols for the life of feeling, creating ways in which the inner life may be made
knowable” (1987a, p. 226).
And since this inner life is the life of a body, with all its complexities of rhythms, tensions,
releases, movement, balance, and taking up room in space, so surely the essential thing
about symbols is that they should show in themselves, through their formal pattern, a
similar theme of structural tensions and balances and release, but transfigured in a timeless
co-existence. (1987a, p. 226)

Through this process, suggests Milner, the artist makes available, through the
creative product, the possibility of contemplating the primary experiences that had
given rise to the work itself. In this way, according to Milner, art serves, not so
much to recreate the lost object, but rather to create a new object through the
302 BOOK REVIEWS

elaboration of the feeling into form. Milner notes the importance, in art, of being
able to fragment the existent reality so that one might see anew whatever had been
occluded because of habituation: “by unmasking old symbols and making new
ones, thus incidentally making it possible for us to see that the old symbol was a
symbol; whereas before we thought the symbol was a ‘reality’ because we had
nothing else to compare it with” (1987a, p. 229). Such production requires the
capacity for reverie—what Milner calls “absent-mindedness” in which one might
have access to both conscious and unconscious daydreaming.
In “The concentration of the body” (1960), Milner puts forward ideas culled
from her experiments in painting and her clinical work regarding the importance
of paying attention to the moment by moment awareness of one’s body. “It is the
direct sensory (proprioceptive) internal awareness that I am concerned with; in fact
the actual ‘now-ness’ of the perception of one’s body, and therefore the perception
of oneself” (1987a, p. 236). She contends that this body awareness is ultimately
relational, that one cannot entirely separate oneself from the others who have
had a part in one’s experience. In these reflections, she anticipates some of the
knowledge that has been picked from the attachment literature on co-regulation
and marked mirroring, and from physiological studies on mirror neurons to intuit
some of the intricate and often subtle effects humans have upon one another.

I think we are here getting near to talking about a direct sensory internal experience of
the integrating processes that created and go on creating the body. I believe this to be a
direct psycho-physical non-symbolic awareness, although at the same time of course an
experience which is inextricably bound up with the inner images of the relation to another
person. (1987a, p. 237)

Using the knowledge gathered from her own self-observations, Milner suggests
that what is often thought of as narcissistic may be an attempt to discover within
oneself the capacity for a fuller self-enjoyment, rather than focusing self-enjoyment
only in specific regions of the body. As such, “if properly understood, [this] is not
a rejection of the outer world but a step towards a renewed and revitalized cathexis
of it” (1987a, p. 238).
The remaining chapters in this volume consist of tributes to some of the indi-
viduals who had been important to Milner. In 1967, she wrote a tribute to Anton
Ehrenzweig, titled “The hidden order of art”, after his volume of that name. She
notes their common interest in “the role in art of that inherent capacity of the ego’s
awareness which causes it to swing between conscious, directed, deliberative atten-
tion, and an absent-minded dream-like state, in a kind of porpoise-like movement
of emergence and submergence” (1987a, p. 242). She notes her appreciation for
Ehrenzweig’s recognition of how intricately connected the unconscious is with
aesthetics, and for helping her to remember to try to see things with fresh eyes.
In 1972 and 1977, Milner wrote papers on Winnicott, in which she recognizes
contributions he made to the field. She also notes his impact on her appreciation
of links between creativity and chaos, in particular his creative ways of engaging
with his young patients. She describes how Winnicott’s idea regarding the impor-
tance of being able to destroy the good object links up with her own idea regarding
the catastrophe that can ensue when one’s primary omnipotence is disrupted in
 BOOK REVIEWS 303

the context of environmental failures, such that one is left, not with recognition of
one’s capacities but rather with a sense of nothingness. This sense of nothingness,
or emptiness, has become a familiar trope in our travels through Milner’s oeuvre,
one of the symbols or visual models that have emerged to guide her thinking.
Milner describes recalling “once hearing Wilfred Bion say that that one should
not have too many theories but could have as many models as one liked” (1987a,
pp. 284–285). For a visual person such as Milner, models helped to provide her
with symbols that facilitated her clinical thinking, as in her allusion to a drawing
attributed to Wittgenstein, in which four circles are placed over two parallel lines,
representing a koala climbing a tree.
For myself, I found the experience of the four small circles suddenly coming together to
form the unseen image of a living wholeness useful in clinical work. It provided me with
a symbol for thinking about those patients with a precarious sense of self who can sud-
denly come together, even though maybe only momentarily, instead of existing in isolated
fragments … .

I found myself using the diagram with its empty space between the two lines as a way of
reminding myself how emptiness, formlessness, must be the basis of new forms, almost
perhaps that one has to be willing to feel oneself becoming nothing in order to become
something. (1987a, p. 285)

In sum, Milner leaves behind a rich legacy that offers us examples of how we
might discover ourselves sufficiently to be able to assist our patients in the difficult
journey towards finding themselves. By presenting us with her personal methods
along with her clinical work and theory, she illustrates how we might learn to live
more fully and to know ourselves better, and thereby to facilitate others as they
struggle towards greater self-awareness. In the afterward to The Suppressed Madness
of Sane Men, she wonders whether her antipathy for abstract words and jargon had
been an asset:
It may be that this disinclination to use technical terms has helped me to get a better hold
on what seems to have been my deepest preoccupation over the years: that is to do with
one’s sense of being alive and inhabiting one’s own body, what I have called one’s body
presentation, as against body representation or body images, this sense of the inner dark
matrix from which emerges drives to action or thoughts or emotional expression or new
perceivings. (1987a, p. 289)

It seems to me that this disinclination is part of her legacy. Having been willing
to toss aside jargon and convention in order to seek a deeper inner truth, Milner
makes an invitation to us all to try to see past our own forces of habit towards our
own internal treasures, the glimmerings of the unconscious that lie waiting to enrich
and enliven our moments of being in the world.

Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., ABPP

25 Main Street, P.O. Box 962,
Stockbridge, MA 01262-0962, USA
e-mail: mcharles@msu.edu
304 BOOK REVIEWS

REFERENCES

Langer, S. (1951). Feeling and form: A theory of art. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
Milner, M. (1934/2011). A life of one’s own. London and New York: Routledge.
Milner, M. (1937/2011). An experiment in leisure. London and New York:
Routledge.
Milner, M. (1938). The human problem in schools. London: Methuen & Co.
Milner, M. (1957/2011). On not being able to paint. London and New York:
Routledge.
Milner, M. (1969/2011). The hands of the living god: An account of a psycho-
analytic treatment. London and New York: Routledge.
Milner, M. (1987a). The suppressed madness of sane men: Forty-four years of
exploring psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Milner, M. (1987b/2011). Eternity’s sunrise: A way of keeping a diary. London and
New York: Routledge.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and reality. London and New York: Routledge.

DOI:10.1057/ajp.2012.15

Descent into Darkness—The Psychodynamics of Mental Illness: An Introduction

and Illustration in the Form of a Novel, by Richard D. Chessick, M.D., Ph.D.,
Xlibris, Bloomington, IN, 2011, 297pp.

This book is a stunning intellectual achievement. In both form and content, it

straddles two worlds—art and science. Chessick’s primary goal is to teach psycho-
dynamics and his intention is to do so through this novel. His reason for using this
format is, as he notes in his preface, that individuals in the mental health field read
very little. Accordingly, very little, including Freud’s work (which Chessick considers
“our basic text”) is read in any depth. His hope is that a novel would be a more
palatable exposure to the basic ideas and current controversies in psychoanalysis.
This is a bit like getting someone to eat broccoli by adding a nice cheese sauce.
However, another reason for a novel is one of Chessick’s messages; the fullest
understanding of the human psyche requires a dialogue between science and the
humanities, or as he refers to it, the human sciences. Art is necessary because it
can express truths that are inarticulable in another medium.
In keeping with present trends in publishing, Descent into Darkness is currently
available only as an e-book. The basic plot of the novel is that Martin, an aging
Chicago psychoanalyst with heart disease, receives a grant to lead an educational
tour to Turkey. He chose Turkey because he wanted to build upon Freud’s meta-
phor of the mind being similar to archeological layers, where what is new is built
on and incorporates the remnants of the past. Modern Turkey is a perfect choice.
The region’s 10,000-year history of successive civilizations, each built on the
ruins of a preceding one; provides both clear examples and a context for the

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